Toppling the King

The reign of Peter I of Germany ended abruptly this week

May 18, 2025

Dear Reader,

This week, my newsletter for members took a look at the secret document compiled by the BfV spy service that they have used to label the AfD as “verified extremist.” I argue that the report tells us more about the BfV spy agency than it does about the inner workings of the right-wing party.

Now to today’s newsletter…

Two summers ago, I left the Federal Republic of Germany and stepped into another country. That in itself is not unusual – after all, no other nation in Europe has as many land borders as Germany.

The unusual thing was that I was 170 kilometres west of Poland in an area surrounded by German settlements. Also odd: I never needed to show a passport – and the country I was entering was also called Deutschland. The only slight difference: it had a monarch – a guy called Peter who was a cook and martial arts trainer before he followed his calling to become king of the German people.

To call the border to the Königreich Deutschland underwhelming wouldn’t quite do it justice. Google Maps led me to an address at the end of a sandy road on the outskirts of Wittenberg, a small town in Saxony-Anhalt.

On the right side of the road was a high, whitewashed wall. Behind the wall, a bleached flag hung from a pole: a sun imposed over the German national colours. Next to the entrance, a young man with a clean-shaven head sat on a plastic chair.

The Königreich Deutschland was on the lookout for new subjects and it was holding an open day at its headquarters – a former meat-packing factory that had been the first piece of territory that Peter had taken into his realm.

Peter Fitzek, aka Peter Menschensohn, aka Peter I, set up this putative state in a grandiose ceremony back in 2012 in which he declared himself the sovereign of an independent German kingdom. Since then, he claims to have convinced some 6,000 people to become subjects of his throne and has slowly acquired increasingly impressive tracts of land, including three palaces in Saxony, one of which cost over €5 million.

I was a little nervous as I approached the border to the Königreich. It might have been the vaguely Nazi sun symbol on the flag, or the vaguely Nazi-looking youth at the door, or the fact that I was entering what German authorities describe as the largest sect in the Reichsbürger movement – a right-wing belief that Germans are most happy living under monarchical rule.

When I went inside, though, I was soon put at ease. I was picked up by Marc, a slightly built former aeronautical engineer in his mid-twenties. Marc was wearing a blue cotton shirt and spectacles. He looked like he’d just come back from a hard day in the office.

Sitting in the sun-filled courtyard at the back of the property, he told me what had attracted him to the kingdom. Its monetary system didn’t believe in interest payments, he explained. “Interest takes away your wealth little by little without you noticing it. So my main motivation was to look for a place with a monetary system based on material assets.”

Before entering the Königreich Deutschland, he had had his own prejudices about Reichsbürger and their fascination with guns, but he found the people to be “warm-hearted, peaceful and thoughtful.”

Prejudices about them being Nazis were also wide of the mark, he claimed. “There are plenty of people of colour here, including in leading positions,” he said, adding that anyone could become a citizen as long as they spoke German and had studied the constitution.

“Our mission is to create a space where people can develop themselves free from the bureaucracy and demands of the Federal Republic,” he said. “People who come to us want a return to common sense.”

I asked why he had chosen to leave a democracy to live in a kingdom. “This is a true democracy,” he replied, explaining that the Königreich’s constitution allows citizens to vote in councils. “I don’t have to obey the king,” he insisted.

At the same time, whenever he wasn’t sure of the answer to a question, he deferred to his ruler. “You’ll have to ask Peter,” he told me on several occasions. He appeared to genuinely believe that police in the Federal Republic would accept a driving licence issued by the Königreich. “You’ll have to ask Peter for a precise explanation of the law,” he said after I pointed out that members of the Königreich had repeatedly been arrested for driving without a proper licence.

Marc was an intelligent man. But he seemed to genuinely believe that the Königreich was a legitimate, internationally recognised state.

After we had chatted for a while, he showed me the money-minting press, the health insurance company (it wouldn’t insure people who’d been given a Covid vaccine due to uncertainty over long-term side effects, but I’d have to ask Peter for the exact reason), and a firm that built “emissions-free” heating systems.

Finally, I was granted an audience with the King himself.

I’d mainly prepared for the interview by watching YouTube clips of the coronation, in which Peter held a sword and wore royal red robes.

Our meeting wasn’t to be quite as grand. Peter received me in his office – a mid-20th-century concrete annex to the original factory building. In his mid-50s and thickset, Peter I wears his thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail.

He sat on a sofa opposite me and told me I could address him with the informal du.

“This is our sovereign territory. The German Republic has lost power here; they don’t interfere in our affairs,” he assured me, before handing me a letter from a German court, which he said was proof that they recognised him as sovereign of an independent country.

How had he managed to set up a rival state to the Federal Republic, I asked. He launched into a detailed lecture on German constitutional history. Speaking in precise sentences, he referenced various articles of the Grundgesetz (Germany’s 1949 constitution), plus decades of rulings by the constitutional court. As far as I could make out, he was arguing that the Grundgesetz was only meant as a temporary document and it allowed the German people to replace it if they so chose.

For a layman on constitutional law such as myself, Peter’s explanation of why his state was more than just a fantasy may have been persuasive. But it was clear throughout the conversation that he also saw himself as a messianic figure.

God had spoken to him and delivered the constitution for the new state through his pen, he told me at one point. Later on, he revealed that he was the reincarnation of a Babylonian prophet and had powers of premonition. These, he claimed, allowed him to foresee that Satanists would take over Germany by the end of the decade. The only way to avoid this gloomy fate was for his kingdom to peacefully reclaim all the territory that belonged to the Kaiserreich in 1913. He seemed sure that Poland would be willing to give up large parts of its territory once it realised the righteousness of his cause.

Throughout the conversation, he spoke with the utmost earnestness. Occasionally, he would be distracted by background noise and would snap at his assistant to shut a window or close a door. He didn’t strike me as a man who tolerated much dissent.

I had read that Peter infuses his utopian visions with antisemitic tropes. My final question to him was whether Jews were welcome in his kingdom. “I have great respect for Jews as people of the book, but unfortunately, very many Satanists disguise themselves as Jews,” was his answer.

After I left my meeting with Peter, I met Marc again. He seemed far too normal, far too spießig (strait-laced), to fall for Peter’s wild, occult view of the world. I asked him whether he had heard his king’s theory about Satanists disguising themselves as Jews. He replied somewhat sheepishly that the Königreich was about more than just Peter – and that one didn’t have to agree with him on everything.

Later, I drank tea with a young woman who, as far as I could make out, had suffered a nervous breakdown before joining the Königreich. She said that the German state was becoming ever more oppressive and suggested that the debate around vaccine mandates (this was just after Covid) had been the final straw. She also seemed convinced that a mysterious global elite was pulling the strings in the background.

I’m relating this story because, as of this week, the Königreich Deutschland is no more.

In one of his first decisions, Germany’s new interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), banned the movement. Simultaneously, arrest warrants were issued for Peter and his three closest advisers.

The kingdom was a “counter-state” to the Federal Republic, which posed a threat to its monopoly on the use of force, Dobrindt said on Tuesday. “We will take decisive action against those who attack our free democratic basic order,” he added. On the same day, the Federal Office of Prosecution announced charges against Peter for running illegal banking and insurance operations.

It turns out that, despite Peter’s claims to be the head of an independent state, his Königreich was registered as a Verein – a club – with German authorities. The Interior Ministry has now closed down the Verein, seized its assets and taken down its website.

I’m not sure what to think of the decision.

On the one hand, Peter was obviously an egomaniacal cult leader. According to reports I’ve read, adherents were encouraged to hand their property over to the Königreich but then could never get it back.

On the other, the justification for shutting it down seems pretty thin-skinned. The Interior Ministry complained that Peter was trying to “continually diminish the territory of the German state” via his land acquisitions. That might be true, but so far he had only managed to capture around 121 hectares of the Federal Republic’s 36 million hectares of territory. I don’t think the Berlin Republic was in any existential danger any time soon.

For some citizens of the Königreich, the actions of the Interior Ministry will likely provide definitive proof of the authoritarianism of the modern German state. For others, it might offer the chance to regain some of the money they gave up when they joined Peter’s fantasy kingdom.

Peter, at least, can comfort himself that he is in good company. Let’s hope for his sake that he is treated better than Richard the Lionheart, who complained that his imprisonment in a castle in the Pfalz in the 12th century involved wearing chains so heavy that even an ass would not have been able to move them.