suspicion of terrorism
Planned Lauterbach kidnapping: Elderly woman arrested
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD). photo
© Kay Nietfeld/dpa
The so-called “Reich citizens” do not recognize the institutions of the Federal Republic. A woman in her mid-seventies from this milieu is said to have planned with several men to kidnap Karl Lauterbach.
In connection with the allegedly planned kidnapping of Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD), the federal prosecutor’s office had an elderly woman arrested on suspicion of terrorism. The woman held a senior position in the administrative part of the anti-state group that was exposed in April, the authority said on Thursday in Karlsruhe.
According to the announcement, the Germans made, among other things, guidelines for advancing and coordinating the group’s plans. She was involved in procuring weapons and explosives, repeatedly called for the project to be implemented quickly and gave concrete deadlines. She is also said to have held recruitment talks with potential association members. According to information from the German Press Agency, she is a retired teacher. The 75-year-old theologian is said to have retired from teaching in 2006.
According to official information, officials from the State Criminal Police Office of Rhineland-Palatinate and the Saxon police arrested the accused on Thursday in the district of Central Saxony and searched the premises. A magistrate ruled in the afternoon that the woman was remanded in custody.
Attorney General determined
They are pursuing an ideology that rejects the Basic Law and the basic state order of the Federal Republic of Germany, it said. Rather, according to these ideas, the German Reich continues to exist on the basis of the constitution of 1871. Four suspected accomplices, all Germans from Neustadt an der Weinstrasse (Rhineland-Palatinate), Falkensee near Berlin and from the districts of Ammerland (Lower Saxony) and Landshut (Bavaria), were arrested on April 13. Almost two weeks later, the Attorney General took over the investigation.
According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the group had set itself the goal of triggering conditions similar to civil war in Germany and thus ultimately bringing about the overthrow of the federal government and parliamentary democracy. “For this purpose, it was planned to bring about a nationwide “black out” by damaging or destroying power supply facilities,” it said. In addition, Minister Lauterbach was to be kidnapped, with the killing of bodyguards in the room. The association was therefore divided into a “military” and an “administrative” branch.
The former teacher who has now been arrested was deprived of her pension because of her “Reich citizen” ideas, against which she unsuccessfully defended herself legally. Last March, her lawsuit before the Rhineland-Palatinate Higher Administrative Court failed. According to information from security circles, at the end of October 2021 she was part of a group that had disturbed a prayer service in Berlin Cathedral. According to a report by rbb at the time, among other things, anti-Semitic slogans were shouted. A house ban was pronounced against the woman and her like-minded people.