People are strange

I couldn't really find any explanation in U.S. media of the ideology or objectives of the organization that was the subject of a mass bust in Germany yesterday. They've been called "far right extremists,"and in the German context you might jump to the conclusion that they are neo-Nazis, but this doesn't seem exactly to be the case. I found what I expect is the most coherent explanation we're likely to get from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Apparently some neo-Nazis have latched onto it but they're a minority of participants.

In fact members of the "Reichsbürger" movement (which just means citizens of the realm, although the term "reich" has special resonance in Germany) have a variety of beliefs, including Q-anon adherents and other strange conspiracy theorists. What they apparently have in common is a set of ideas comparable to the sovereign citizens movement in the U.S., which based on a variety of historico-legalistic mumbo-jumbo asserts the the German state does not actually exist and that its authority can be ignored. This is impossible to summarize but to quote a bit from the ISD explainer:

The Reichsbürger (‘Citizens of the Empire’) movement is a German ideology with similarities to the ‘sovereign citizens’ found in the US, Canada and UK. While the Reichsbürger movement encompasses different tendencies, they are united by a shared belief that the Federal Republic of Germany is not a sovereign state and that the laws and rules enforced by the German state are thus not binding. Many adherents of the Reichsbürger movement are convinced that the Federal Republic is instead a corporation, often called the ‘BRD GmbH’ (Federal Republic of Germany Limited Liability Company). Similar claims are widespread among sovereign citizen circles in the United States, who believe their country has become a corporation, though they disagree if this happened in the 1800s, or when the US abandoned the gold standard.

As with their US counterparts, there is no consensus in the Reichsbürger scene concerning the last legitimate form of government in Germany. Some members of the Reichsbürger movement believe that the Third Reich still exists but is occupied. Others argue that the German Empire of 1871 continues to persist. . . . 

Reichsbürgers, along with the broader sovereigntist movement, believe they live under occupation by hostile, illegitimate powers. They therefore see resistance against the state and its representatives as legitimate. This can take different forms: from printing their own passports to the declaration of kingdoms or other spaces of sovereignty on private properties, refusals to pay fines, harassment of civil servants and political representatives all the way to taking violent action. During the raid on 7 December, counter-terror police therefore received support from special police units responsible for arresting high-risk suspects, as security agencies have long expressed concern about the high number of armed Reichsbürger adherents. In 2016, a supporter fatally shot a police officer in Georgensmünd (Bavaria) during a police raid related to the illegal possession of firearms. Similar incidents over the past five years have turned violent when ‘Reichsbürger’ tried to evade police controls.

 

While none of this seems to make any sense, it does point to the deeper truth that the nation state, like all social institutions including money, business corporations, and the PTA is a kind of shared fiction. It exists only because we agree to pretend that it does. That's no excuse for arbitrarily rejecting those beliefs -- we need them, they're part of our nature as a social species. Of course we can question them and try to change them, but overthrowing the German state and restoring the monarchy, especially on behalf of a mixture of random nutjobs, strikes me as a bad idea.

 

(BTW, Hitler never did provide cheap personal transportation. His Volkswagen project never produced a single civilian automobile. It was what we today call vaporware. Obviously the corporation did start to make cars after the war.)