How QAnon Inspired Attempted Coup in Germany

Far-right extremists arrested in Germany on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the government became more militant, in part, due to the influence of the QAnon conspiracy theory, researchers have told Newsweek.

German authorities stunned the world this week when they announced 25 members of an eclectic conspiracy movement allegedly plotted the overthrow of the federal government to install a monarch as the head of state.

Members of the Reichsbürger plot allegedly aimed to install a minor noble known as Heinrich XIII as its leader and had amassed weapons to carry out a coup.

While the Reichsbürger group is focused on ushering in a government modeled on the German Empire which fell at the end of World War I, it has drawn on elements of the U.S.-centric QAnon movement to strengthen its narrative.

The debunked QAnon online movement claims an elite international cabal of Satanic cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex ring whose members are made up of businessmen, Democrats, and Hollywood celebrities.

Donald Trump is a central figure among its followers, who believe he will somehow expose this ring and execute its members.

QAnon members were present at the January 6 riot at the Capitol, which followed a speech given by Trump to his supporters.

Pia Lamberty, managing director of the German Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) told Newsweek that QAnon narratives, in part, played a role in the group allegedly pursuing violence as a means to overthrow the German government.

She said: "You saw a big overlap between Reichsbürger when it comes to QAnon beliefs because the core idea is pretty similar, [that] of a state that is not a real thing [that it is] a deep state in the German kingdom.

"It is something that can be easily brought together as ideas, but disagreement about the legitimacy of the state is one of the core beliefs in both [groups] and data from the U.S. shows that radicalization happens much faster through QAnon beliefs and that they have a radicalizing factor. I think this could also partially explain why Reichsbürger in Germany became more militant."

Harking back as far as the 1980s, the Reichsbürger movement predates QAnon and its members have been involved in violence before the alleged coup attempt in Germany this week.

In 2016, Adrian Ursache resisted being evicted from his home in Reuden and shot a police officer. He was later convicted of attempted murder in 2019.

German leaders also slammed Reichsbürgers in August 2020 when its members tried to storm the Reichstag (German Parliament) in Berlin, an event which bore similarities to the January 6 riot.

Since 2020, the Reichsbürger has become further intertwined with other conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, which had the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines as a major focus.

Lamberty said: "Everything is suddenly illegitimate and you think that you're fighting evil. It's a fairly apocalyptic worldview and world that you create, especially when the vaccine is seen as something deadly - a weapon to kill humanity and that makes it so dangerous."

The researcher also claimed Germany had the second-highest number of QAnon adherents, only behind the U.S. CeMAS has identified 115 German-speaking QAnon Telegram channels with more than 600,000 followers combined.

A CeMAS study, published earlier this year, found during the early stage of the pandemic QAnon channels on social media used a real-life military exercise, later canceled due to the pandemic, to spread false narratives that NATO plotted to overthrow deep state governments across Europe.

It added: "These narratives tied in elements of the Reichsbürger scene with QAnon conspiracies, suggesting that Germany remains ruled by Allied occupation forces due to the supposed lack of a peace treaty after World War II."

A 130,000-strong QAnon Telegram channel also falsely claimed the July 2021 flooding in western Germany had "flushed the corpses of 600 children out from underground facilities and that the bodies had been laid out in a gymnasium."

James Beverley, author of The QAnon Deception, noted how German-speaking social media users had helped spread the conspiracy.

He told Newsweek: "Germany gets first place for having the largest QAnon following in the non-English speaking world.

"The anonymous Q first posted on October 28, 2017, and within a month Germans were introduced to QAnon in a YouTube video by Oliver Janich, a rather infamous political and media figure who has been in exile in in the Philippines. QAnon grew slowly through the next two years but exploded in 2020 as the pandemic hit Germany and the world.

"Various experts on German conspiracy groups estimate that over 200,000 in the population identify closely with QAnon. One of the most influential social media platforms for QAnon in Germany is Qlobal Change on Telegram. In early 2022 there were over 140,000 subscribers and this is just one of 115 channels. Some posts on Qlobal are viewed over 150,000 times."

Lamberty added the emergence of the Querdenken anti-lockdown protests in Germany might have helped the conspiracy theory spread in the country.

Lamberty added: "There is an overlap in symbols used by QAnon and Querdenken, a conspiracy movement that organized protests in the first year of the pandemic. So you already had this symbol that you could co-opt."

Querdenken protestors were also vocal in their opposition to children being given the vaccine.

Lamberty said the far-right in Germany had a history of using children in its propaganda and radicalization efforts.

She added: "The German [QAnon] movement also focuses often on children as a topic. There were special groups just aimed at children where you would have to give your student ID to become a member and [there were] short trips just for kids.

"To talk about children is also a tradition in German right-wing activism, as well as having a campaign around children and child abuse."

The CeMAS report also found there was a strong overlap between QAnon and the Reichsbürger movement.

It added: "Agreement with QAnon narratives strongly correlates with belief in conspiracy narratives regarding COVID-19. QAnon is a meta-conspiracy narrative, with numerous other conspiracy narratives woven into it."

Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, told Newsweek the conspiracy could easily spread in countries other than the U.S.

He added: "Q spread in Germany by sanding off the more US-centric bits and focusing more on both German cultural issues and generic fears of "they're all lying to us."

"It's the reason why Q works in other countries in general - every culture has its own enemies and its own conspiracy theories, and Q exploits those very well. The German group was a grab bag of theories, of which Q was just one aspect."

Lamberty said, despite having monitored QAnon in Germany for several years, she believed it was not taken seriously in the country.

She said: "It's how crazy the conspiracy is that people think 'that cannot be dangerous' and I think people like to think [about] what's happening in the U.S. often, but that it has nothing to do with us."