Germany arrests suspected members of right-wing group plotting revolt

German police have arrested eight suspected members of a right-wing militant group driven by racist ideology and conspiracy theories who had been training in warfare for the downfall of the modern German state, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

News of the arrests came as a 450-strong police operation was under way to dismantle the group, named by prosecutors as "Saechsische Separatisten", or Saxony Separatists, which has the abbreviation SS, the same as the Nazi party's elite militia.

"Our security authorities have thus thwarted at an early stage militant coup plans by right-wing terrorists, who were longing for a Day X to attack people and our state with armed force," Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.

Spiegel Online reported that one of the suspects was a politician for the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) in eastern Germany.

This would be the second coup plot uncovered in Germany in recent years.

The so-called "Reichsbuerger" movement was exposed in 2022, led by a would-be prince with ambitions to overthrow the state and install a caretaker government, in a case that shocked Germany with its detailed network and planning.

The group targeted in Tuesday's operation was formed no later than November 2020, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement.

"It is a militant group of 15 to 20 individuals whose ideology is characterised by racist, anti-Semitic and partially apocalyptic ideas," the statement added. Convinced that Germany is nearing collapse, with the fall of government and society prophesied for an undetermined "Day X", the group had been training to use force to establish a new system in the country's east inspired by Nazism, according to investigators.

"If necessary, unwanted groups of people are supposed to be removed from the area by means of ethnic cleansing," the statement said.

Prosecutors said the suspects had completed paramilitary training, focusing on urban warfare, firearms handling, nocturnal marching and patrolling.

The eight face charges of participating in a domestic terrorist organisation. Some are to be prosecuted as minors and adolescents. They suspects were expected to be brought before a judge later in the day.