German Extremists: Bring Back the Reich

Peter Fitzek may look like your typical middle-aged ex-owner of a tattoo shop sporting a receding hairline and a slicked-back ponytail, but actually he thinks he’s the king of Germany.

He appeared live before the world on YouTube in 2012, when he was “crowned” while wearing a red and white faux ermine robe. At the time, he seemed just another small-time manipulative conman with a narcissistic personality disorder.

But the group he appears to represent is now seen as a threat.

In the eyes of the German Security Service, Fitzek is a “Reichsbürger” (imperial citizen) and thus part of a loose scene that, since January, has been investigated as a “serious extremist danger.”

It’s made up of several thousand Germans who believe in some variation of the conspiracy theory that there was foul play after the capitulation of the Wehrmacht, the German army, in 1945, and the Federal German Republic that replaced the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler is actually a limited-liability company in Frankfurt that is being controlled by a Jewish world government based in the United States.

Reichsbürger conspiracists have made it their mission to “reactivate” the German Reich with the borders it had before World War II.