MANY Germans assume that nowadays it is others, especially Americans, who are prone to conspiracy theories and the rantings of paranoid megalomaniacs. By contrast Germans, forever chastened by a Nazi past, are doomed to boring responsibility. This makes the exceptions all the more fascinating. One is the tiny but growing movement of “imperial citizens”.
The so-called Reichsbürger are convinced that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) does not exist. In its place the old German Empire endures, which in their telling was never properly abolished and persists in the borders of either 1871 or 1937. There are nearly as many lines of pseudo-legal reasoning as adherents. One rests on the fact that the Allies never signed a peace treaty with Germany after the second world war. Another cites selectively from a decision by Germany’s supreme court in 1973 regarding an agreement between West and East Germany. The upshot, say Reichsbürger, is that the Federal Republic is really a limited-liability company based in Frankfurt and controlled by a Jewish world government based in America.
To the…
