WHO EXACTLY IS SURPRISED THAT TRUMPISM APPEALS TO NAZIS?:

It may have come as a surprise, however, when prosecutors stated that the group was inspired by "QAnon ideology."

Despite QAnon's U.S.-centric narrative focusing on former President Donald Trump, the conspiracy movement has now spread across the globe. German-speaking communities have become the largest non-American audience for QAnon, finding a ready audience in the Reichsbürger movement, which falsely believes that Germany is still an occupied country because, they claim, there was never a formalized peace treaty with Allied forces after World War 2 (there was).

One reason QAnon was adopted so widely in Germany is that there is a strong overlap between QAnon's conspiracy narratives and those shared by the Reichsbürger movement, including the belief that the pandemic was created by the "deep state" as part of a long-running conspiracy to control the population.

Now, experts believe that the merging of the Reichsbürger movement and QAnon could lead to a dramatic increase in the potential for violent extremism committed by conspiracy adherents.

"[This case] could be the most significant QAnon terror group and plot worldwide," Daniel Koehler, director of the German Institute in Radicalisation and De-Radicalisation Studies, told VICE World News on Wednesday about the foiled plan to overthrow the German government.

The plot, which included a plan to violently attack the German parliament building known as the Reichstag, is worrying those tracking the far-right in Germany, given the number of people involved and the fact it included members of the security forces. Far-right experts in the U.S. have voiced similar concerns about QAnon followers, who played a central role in the storming of the Capitol because they believed they had no other option.

 "A hardcore of believers think that now they don't have any chance besides violent action," Miro Dittrich, the co-founder of CeMAS, a think tank specializing in conspiracy ideology and right-wing extremism, told VICE News. "Because if you actually believe that there's a genocide happening against your people by an evil almighty enemy, and you have proof that the government has been taken over and you can't change anything with elections, the militant believers now start doing violent plots." 

To try to understand this bizarre incident and the movement behind it, I reached out to Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King's College London and a leading expert on terrorism in Germany. Neumann has been studying the Reichsbürger for over a decade, which he learned of by researching an older movement that existed in America -- so-called "sovereign citizens" who believe that the 14th Amendment (or possibly the end of the gold standard) secretly overturned the US Constitution, and that they are under no obligation to obey America's laws.

"I first took an interest in this when I was teaching at Georgetown, 12 years ago. I learned about the sovereign citizens in the United States," he says. "I didn't know that we had a similar movement in Germany, where I come from."

Recently, Reichsbürger adherents have started taking on ideas from another American conspiracy theory: QAnon, the idea that Donald Trump is leading a secret campaign against a cabal of Satanic pedophiles who run the world. Somehow, according to Neumann, this peculiarly American theory has become a major part of the German extremist landscape.

"The second most used language in QAnon chat rooms on Telegram is German. The second most translated language of QAnon videos and documents is German," he says.

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