In the criminal trial against a group of suspected citizens of the Reich, the 71-year-old main defendant, Karl Burghard B., made a confession.

The public prosecutor's office accuses the man from Brühl in Baden of eleven cases of incitement to hatred and illegal possession of weapons.

He is said to have repeatedly denied the Holocaust on the Internet and called for violence against refugees.

Rudiger Soldt

Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.

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The three co-accused men aged 56, 57 and 65 have to answer to the fourth criminal chamber of the Mannheim district court for illegal possession of weapons. The public prosecutor's office, court and defense are trying to reach an agreement for the men.

Racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic propaganda

The men are said to have belonged to a "Reichsbürger cell" that was uncovered during a police search in January 2017.

The allegation by the federal prosecutor that the men had formed a right-wing terrorist organization could not be proven.

The arrest of the current main defendant Karl B. made headlines five years ago because he had posed as "Burghard von Buchonia" and as a "Celtic druid".

Some of his accomplices also called him 'Nazi Gandalf'.

In Brühl in Baden, the hometown of tennis player Steffi Graf, he attracted attention for years because he wanted to build a stone circle in the floodplains of the Rhine – similar to the Neolithic cult site of Stonehenge in southern Great Britain.

The man had been spreading racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic propaganda on the Internet for years.

He called the refugee crisis a "plan by Jewish enemies" and described former Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer (Greens) as a Jew.

At an event in 2012, he called for the “forced Christianization of Europe”.

In 2019, the self-proclaimed druid also justified the murder of the former Kassel district president Walter Lübcke (CDU) on the Internet.

He called for more "enemies of the people" to be executed.

Investigators and terrorism experts attribute the man to an esoteric right-wing extremist scene, which is said to have gained popularity especially after the refugee crisis.