The German domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz] that there are about 18,000 people supporting or otherwise associated with the loose anti-government Reichsbürger movement, 950 of whom have been classified as “far right extremists.”

The number is about 80 percent more than it was in 2016, but however alarming as that increase may sound, the BfV said that investigations into the Reichsbürger movement revealed more of its members, as opposed to the movement itself having a mass influx of new members.

Investigations into the Reichsbürger movement intensified after one of their members shot dead a police officer in Bavaria in 2016 after resisting arrest and confiscation of assorted and illegally hoarded weapons.

Reichsbürger roughly translates to “Citizen of the German Reich.”

The loose movement’s affiliates reject the legitimacy of the modern German government, saying that it is a puppet regime legally controlled by the victorious Second World War Allies since 1945.

They believe that Germany’s legitimate borders are those that were in 1937, before the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland and eventually the rest of Czechoslovakia.

These borders, as opposed to those of post-war Germany, include Eastern Prussia, now controlled by Russia, as well as Western Prussia, ceded to Poland.

Other Reichsbürgers believe that the 1871 borders of the German Reich under Otto Von Bismarck are in fact the correct ones; they included the historically much-disputed region of Alsace-Lorraine, now controlled by France.

The Reichsbürgers have no leadership or “cells,” but are only loosely associated with each other only by their common ideas that aren’t even concrete. Some Reichsbürgers are monarchists; others believe that Germany was wronged in 1945 due to the expulsion of millions of Germans from Prussia and other historically German lands, while some are presumed to be outright neo-Nazis. Their common characteristic is that they reject the German government as legitimate, but as far as other opinions go, the Reichsbürgers are a mixed bag.

A few hundred of their members are licensed gun owners.

One of the movement’s members was 42-year-old Adrian Ursache, who also happened to be the winner of the Mister Germany beauty pageant. He is currently facing trial for attempted murder after an August 2016 gun fight with police officers as they attempted to evict him from his home. Reichsbürgers typically do not recognize state officials or documentation, and some of them have resorted to printing their own passports and drivers’ licenses.

The case of Wolfgang P., who murdered the police office in Bavaria, lead to the wider crackdown that the BfV is conducting on the Reichsbürgers. He was convicted in October 2017 to life imprisonment.

source:   https://www.dailysabah.com/europe/2018/04/30/reichsburger-movement-larger-than-previously-estimated