It is not the first time that Henry XIII. Prince Reuss takes a seat in the witness chair. In the trial at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court, which began in May 2024, he had already testified “about the person”. In June last year he described his family history. Anyone who witnessed him saw a man who found it difficult to speak that day. With tears and in a broken, almost hoarse voice, he recited what he had previously written down on a piece of paper.
More than a year and a half later, the seventy-four-year-old still finds it difficult to testify in court. His voice breaks after just one sentence and he has to take pauses again and again when he speaks. “I don’t know what this emotionality is about,” he says after a few sentences. “That’s strange to me.”
Sniffling and sometimes in tears, the man who is considered the central figure in this trial spoke publicly about the accusations for the first time this Wednesday morning. “I never spoke of storming the Reichstag building or the Bundestag,” says Prince Reuss. On the contrary: he would have considered such a plan to be “idiotic” at the time.
“It was all about saving children”
Prince Reuss denies or puts into perspective many of the things the prosecution accuses him of. In his statement, he paints the picture of a single father who fell for a conspiracy story because it was about children. He always read on social media about so-called DUMBS (Deep Underground Military Bases), where children are allegedly held captive and abused. This assumption is part of conspiracy theories according to which there is a global pedophile ring that also includes celebrities and politicians.
It is true that he gave 50,000 euros to two brothers from Switzerland, says Prince Reuss. Contrary to what the federal prosecutor’s office claims, this money was intended for the fight against the alleged pedophile ring – and not for a violent overthrow. “It was just about saving children, nothing else was communicated.”
As co-defendant Birgit Malsack-Winkemann said, belief in a supposed earth alliance is said to have played a central role for him. Prince Reuss believed that this alliance would bring about a revolution and that the legal situation in Germany would then have to be restructured. He did not have a precise idea of what such an intervention would have meant or what the conditions in Germany would have looked like afterwards. “I admit that it was unrealistic to even think about something like that.” It was clear to him before his arrest that this alliance did not exist.
But it wasn’t just the fight against the DUMBS that is said to have made Prince Reuss hope for the Alliance to intervene. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he said he had tried to regain his family’s former possessions. He did not believe in German sovereignty. However, he denies being a citizen of the Reich.
First contact with co-defendant in October 2021
His statement makes it clear that he believed that a reorganization of conditions in Germany would have made this easier for him. Prince Reuss emphasizes that he was always interested in a peaceful path. He said several times that day that he rejected violence. “I am not a terrorist, I was not a terrorist and I will not become a terrorist.”
His search for this ominous alliance is said to have been crucial for the initial contact with the co-defendants. On October 18, 2021, he was approached “at a business appointment” – the accusation is based on a Reich Citizens’ Meeting – by a man who is known in the Reich Citizens scene. He told him about a high-ranking military official who had a connection to the Alliance and who was in the city. Out of curiosity, he agreed to a meeting.
The man then drove with him to a garden colony near Dresden. There, Maximilian Eder, who was also accused, turned out to be the person who had been announced to him. “So I sat across from a senior military man who talked to me about pedophile abuse in underground bases.” Afterwards there were several meetings, including with other people and co-defendants, at which the DUMBS and the alliance were discussed.
Prince Reuss ends his statement that day with the words “end of the chapter”. According to his defense attorney, Roman von Alvensleben, in the next few weeks he wants to comment, among other things, on the council meetings and “how he got into this situation.”
