
Heinrich Reuss (4 December 1951-), the self-proclaimed Heinrich XIII, Prinz Reuß, was a German self-styled aristocrat and leader of the "Patriotic Union" subgroup of the far-right and monarchist Reichsbürger movement. On 7 December 2022, he was arrested for plotting a coup d'etat against the Federal Republic.
Biography[]
Heinrich Reuss was born in Budingen, Hesse, West Germany in 1951, one of six children of Prince Heinrich I Reuss of Kostritz and Duchess Woizlawa Feodora of Mecklenburg. He worked as a real estate entrepreneur and engineer in Frankfurt am Main and became owner of the Waidmannsheil hunting lodge in Bad Lobenstein, Thuringia, where he lived with his Russian lover Vitalia. In 2008, Reuss was turned away from the House of Reuss because of his close ties with the far-right Reichsbürger movement and his conspiracy theorism. In a January 2019 speech at the Worldwebforum in Zürich, he claimed that the Jewish Rothschild family and Freemasons were responsible for financing wars and revolutions in order to eliminate monarchies, and Reuss became a prominent conspiracy theorist who denied the legality of the German democratic and legal systems. In November 2021, he began plotting a coup against the German federal government with the help of former paratrooper commander Rüdiger von Pescatore, and Pescatore planned to storm the Reichstag in Berlin, upon which Reuss would become regent of Germany, install his shadow cabinet (including Justice Minister Birgit Malsack-Winkemann) in power, and renegotiate Germany's post-World War II treaties with the help of the Russian Federation, with which he had established contact through Vitalia. On 7 December 2022, Reuss was arrested at his hunting lodge as part of a national crackdown against his "Patriotic Union" organization.