Germany thwarts neo-Nazi militant coup plan

BERLIN:

German police have arrested eight suspected members of a neo-Nazi militant group driven by racist ideology and conspiracy theories who had been training in warfare for the downfall of the modern German state, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

News of the arrests came amid a 450-strong police operation to dismantle the group, named by prosecutors as "Saechsische Separatisten", or Saxony Separatists, which has the abbreviation SS, the same as the Nazi party's elite militia.

"Our security authorities have thus thwarted at an early stage militant coup plans by right-wing terrorists, who were longing for a Day X to attack people and our state with armed force," Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.

Media reports linked one of the suspects to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) -- which commands as much as 18% support in national polls, behind only the centre-right opposition -- although the party itself insisted it had nothing to do with such a group. This would be the second coup plot uncovered in Germany in recent years.

In 2022, authorities exposed the "Reichsbuerger" movement, led by a would-be prince with ambitions to overthrow the state and install a caretaker government, in a case that shocked Germany with its detailed network and planning.

The group targeted in Tuesday's operation was formed no later than November 2020, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement. "It is a militant group of 15 to 20 individuals whose ideology is characterised by racist, anti-Semitic and partially apocalyptic ideas," the statement added.

Convinced that Germany is nearing collapse, with the fall of the government prophesied for an undetermined "Day X", the group had been training to use force to establish a new system in the country's east inspired by Nazism, according to investigators. "If necessary, unwanted groups of people are supposed to be removed from the area by means of ethnic cleansing," the statement said.