Good morning,

Yesterday was a busy one. 

One of the biggest news stories of the year broke in the early hours of the morning when the police conducted raids on over 150 properties across eleven federal states.

What transpired was the stuff that newspaper editors’ dreams. The police had arrested 25 alleged plotters who wanted to overthrow the government and place a minor aristocrat on the throne of a newly monarchical Germany. 

At the head of the plot was a man called Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, the great grandson of the last princely ruler of Gera.

This was truly mad stuff and I spent much of the day trying to figure out who was who in a minor royal family in which every single male is called Heinrich.

Heinrich XIII, a septuagenarian real estate manager, seems to have had a personal vendetta against the Bundesrepublik over the fact that he’d never been given back properties that were taken off grandpa Heinrich by the East German communists.

During a keynote speech that he was (bizarrely) inv…