Reich Citizens and Conspiracy Tellers Infiltrate Peasant Protests Rohingya Refugee Camp Fire: Hundreds Are Left Homeless

The images will also be shown on all channels afterwards. You see a gang of angry people who want to get on Robert Habeck’s ferry, who is returning from vacation. The police have difficulty preventing people from rushing to the departing ship together with the Minister of Economic Affairs and Vice Chancellor. Pepper spray hangs in the air.

In view of the farmers’ demonstrations announced on Monday, the images raise a crucial question: have the farmers lost control of their protest against the abolition of agricultural subsidies? Research by Watson media partner t-online shows how far the attempts of freeriders reach. Traces lead to the environment of accused terrorist suspects from the Corona period, to a scene where people have been working diligently for years to record farmers’ protests.

On Thursday at 2:29 p.m., the members of two groups on the Telegram messenger service called “Consumers & Farmers United” and “Free Schleswig-Holsteiners” received the information at the same time: Robert Habeck would like to have “endless interest” in a “Citizen’s Dialogue.” A call was made that evening to observe the Minister of Green Economy at the Schlüttsiel ferry port, on his way home from holiday.

Telegram is the network where dissatisfied people become radicalized. A group of Reich citizens set up a network there that moved to a primary school when the Ahr valley flooded, dreamed of overthrowing the system and are now apparently trying to influence the peasant protests through the courier service.

But Telegram is not the network of farmers.

‘Telegram comes after fax for farmers’

“For most farmers, Telegram comes long after fax,” says Bernhard Barkmann, a 51-year-old farmer who farms and raises animals in Emsland. The local CDU chapter chairman advocates for the interests of farmers with his blog blogagrar.de, but also criticizes some of their behavior. He explains. «Farmers use WhatsApp. In 2019, there were older colleagues who suddenly wanted a smartphone, even though they had always rejected it. But without WhatsApp you were no longer part of it.”

In 2019, large-scale protests were organized for the first time via WhatsApp groups and on Facebook, culminating in a demonstration with more than 8,500 tractors in Berlin in November. This gave rise to ‘Land creates connection’ associations, which look very different regionally, but with their mobilization power have since emerged as new actors alongside the staid farmers’ association.

One of those new players is Alf Schmidt, who needs 17 sheep dogs for his sheep flocks in Thuringia. Without bandages behind him, he organized a sustained protest lasting several weeks in Berlin in 2021. “My mobile phone is a powerful tool,” he says – Telegram is not on it. He has a network with farmers from all over Germany and, as he says, was also in contact with those behind the demo at the Schlüttsiel ferry port. From his point of view, they are ‘sensible people’.

One of the executives there said of the protest that it was “normal people from the middle class of the country” and whether anyone really “believed that he wanted to use violence against others.” The man’s name is Jann-Henning Dircks. But he also told journalist Martin Lejeune in an interview that there is the saying in North Friesland “Deliver dead as a slave”, “Better dead than a slave”. In 2022, he went to court because two years earlier he had encouraged farmers in a private WhatsApp group to block animal rights activists with a “sledgehammer, accuflex and bolt cutters”. However, he was acquitted of incitement to commit a crime.

“They got the word from the farmers.”

Dircks says about the demonstrators in Schlüttsiel: “99 percent were peaceful.” He could not judge whether it was all about ‘people from the middle of society’. A colleague of his, Stefan Hansen, on YouTube “Sibbershusum” was clearer: “We don’t want to be put on this track. There were about ten out of every thousand that were informed by the farmers.” When it happened.

In fact, it was not only farmers who took part in the farmers’ protest. t-online found a person who posted a message at 1:04 PM in a WhatsApp group with 382 members that Habeck had to be received. However, when asked, the man declined to comment. He doesn’t talk to press people, he says, because everything is just misrepresented. Then he says: They stood there for an hour and a half ‘nice and nice’, but Habeck didn’t have the courage to talk to them. He was an employee himself: “There were professionals, truck drivers, everything was there.”

The calls for protests have long since left the farmers’ circles. Right-wing extremists such as the former NPD and the “Free Saxons” also openly mobilize on Telegram in all professional groups. Since July 2022, there have also been offers on Telegram that at first glance do not seem suspicious: a national network of channels “Consumers and Farmers United” claims to want to express the support of the people and farmers.

“Arminius Erben” already tried it during the farmers’ protest in 2021

Behind this lies a group that calls itself the ‘Heirs of Arminius’, after the Cheruscan prince Arminius, who is revered in some circles as the ‘first German’. “Arminius Erben” already tried to participate in Alf Schmidt’s farmer protests in Berlin in 2021. All kinds of groups came and tried to present their topics, Schmidt remembers. The farmers were also approached for a ‘Merkel must go’ demonstration. “I said that anyone who participates in this is no longer one of us.” Schmidt claims to have told people with other concerns that if they wanted something, they should register it on the neighboring street and see who came.

“Arminius Heirs” called for donations for the farmers, members organized food for the farmers, they looked for connections. Schmidt has publicly rejected this, saying he wanted nothing to do with “Arminius Heirs”. As a result, there were even calls for lynching against him, he says. It was never clear to him what exactly ‘the heirs of Arminius’ wanted.

“Arminius Erben” is headed by a part-time farmer from near Kiel who regularly publishes videos of himself and travels around the country to give private lectures. The ideology of the Reich citizens is apparently behind it, the idea that Germany should be occupied by the US, that the Germans should liberate themselves and then a “1000-year peace empire” awaits. There are echoes of Nazi ideology, which is very ethnic and very Russia-friendly. Sometimes there was overlap with a no longer performing group called “DEUNOD”, a German offshoot of a Russian national liberation movement.

Several members of “Arminius Erben” are now the administrators of the groups that should unite farmers and consumers. The smallest for Bremen has 200 members, the largest for Bavaria almost 5,000. Many new people have joined the party who perhaps just want to show solidarity with the farmers, are obviously disappointed by the traffic light government’s policies – and seem to have no idea where they have ended up.

Groups were recruited for suspected terrorist plans

The team of leaders led groups of QAnon conspiracy believers. They controlled associations designed for ‘Day Terror’ cells.

For example, a current manager is an Isa. She was a close confidante of Sven Birkmann, who had ‘a script for the coup’. Since May 2023, trials have been taking place in Koblenz against Birkmann and four other defendants, who allegedly devised a plan to kidnap Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) and cause a power outage across Germany. Isa’s name is often mentioned during the trial and her house was also searched. She is not the suspect in the trial, but this has led to accusations in her circles that she is secretly working for the state.

Isa participated in meetings of the conspirators with Birkmann and was in charge of the “Veterans Pool” channels set up by the federal state on Telegram, as well as “Corona Rebels Berlin” and “Querdenken Hannover”. And she controlled a Telegram group of helpers from the scene of Reichsbürger and lateral thinkers, who had settled in a primary school during the flood in the Ahr valley, and on the one hand helped with the clean-up work, but on the other hand also used it for networking and raw evidence to search for theories.

The homes of many of those involved were later searched: Sven Birkmann had been there on the Ahr and several suspected ex-military personnel from the much larger group around Heinrich Prinz Reuss XIII. There was also former AfD member of the Bundestag Birgit Malsack-Winkelmann, who has just been accused of plotting a coup. The expulsion of the unwanted flood relief workers also caused misunderstanding among the public at the time.

There were at least two other people in the school on the Ahr who now manage canals to support the farmers. The directors also include former directors of “United Patriots/Day X” and for most of them there are clear references to “Arminius Erben” and to previous plans to overthrow the government.

If farmers plan a protest somewhere, it immediately ends up with ‘Farmers and Consumers United’ and the associated meeting groups. The Reich citizens are constantly asking people to join.

According to information from t-online, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is aware of the groups and the backgrounds of their operators. Many farmers and their supporters probably don’t.

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