Police in Germany say they have smashed a far-right terror plot to overthrow the government and install an aristocrat claiming descent from an ancient royal line as monarch.

German reports say the group, which also includes military figures, planned to storm the Reichstag parliament building and seize power.

Prince Heinrich XIII, 71, who is thought to belong to the House of Reuss, was named among 25 people arrested by cops in raids at 130 locations, including a palace in the state of Thuringia - the ancestral seat of the family.

Prince Heinrich XIV Reuss of Greiz, current head of the House of Reuss-Greiz, denounced his relative after the raids, branding him a “confused old man” who left the family 14 years ago and has not been in contact since.

Also arrested were a 69-year-old former paratrooper named Ruediger v. P. and AfD ex-member of the Bundestag and Berlin judge Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, 58.

Prosecutors say the group - allied under the Reichsbürger banner which rejects the modern state in favour of the German Reich - planned to overthrow the government and found a new state with Heinrich as its monarch.

Federal prosecutors said Heinrich had contacted Russian officials with the aim of negotiating a new order once the German government was overthrown.
He was allegedly assisted in this by a Russian woman, Vitalia B.

The Russian embassy in Berlin has since denied having links to the group.

Suspects were arrested in the German states of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Hesse, Lower Saxony, Saxony, Thuringia as well as in Austria and Italy.

Der Spiegel reported that locations searched include the barracks of Germany's special forces unit KSK in the southwestern town of Calw.

The unit has in the past been scrutinised over alleged far-right involvement by some soldiers. Federal prosecutors refused to confirm or deny the barracks was searched.
Die Welt reported the group had inspected a number of Bundeswehr barracks “for the accommodation of their own troops” once the coup was completed.

Prosecutors said those detained formed a “terrorist organisation with the goal of overturning the existing state order in Germany and replace it with their own form of state, which was already in the course of being founded”.

The suspects were aware that their aim could only be achieved by military means and with force, prosecutors added.

Some of the group's members had made “concrete preparations” to storm Parliament with a small armed group, the prosecutors said.

The group is alleged to have believed in a "conglomerate of conspiracy theories consisting of narratives from the so-called Reich Citizens as well as QAnon ideology”, according to the statement.

The arrested Prince Heinrich claims descent from the House of Reuss which existed in Germany from the early 11th century until the abolition of the monarchy in 1918.
All male descendants of this house were named Heinrich after Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, to whom they owed their titles and lands.