Self-styled king faces trial over alleged Reichsbürger state built on fraud and defiance
Peter Fitzek entered the Düsseldorf courtroom as a defendant, not as the self-proclaimed sovereign he has styled himself for more than a decade. The 61-year-old former chef and karate instructor, who calls himself Peter the First, is now on trial with three other men accused of helping run a banned Reichsbürger network that sought to replace Germany’s federal republic with a parallel state of its own making.
The case reaches far beyond eccentric political theater. Prosecutors say the group built institutions meant to imitate a functioning country: a banking system, an insurance arm, a registration office issuing fake identity documents, and even its own currency. In legal terms, the allegations describe a criminal organisation; in political terms, they describe an attempt to hollow out democratic authority and replace it with an invented hierarchy of “subjects” and “divine beings.”
Fitzek denies committing a crime. Before proceedings began, he described his detention as a human rights violation and said, “They are isolating me completely.”
How the alleged parallel state was built
The indictment centers on a movement that began as ideological rejection of the post-war German state and developed into an organised structure with money, property and administrative machinery. Reichsbürger groups reject the legitimacy of modern Germany; the KRD, or “Kingdom of Germany,” became the largest of those outfits, with around 6,000 members.
Fitzek declared himself “supreme sovereign” in 2012 and was crowned in ermine robes while brandishing a medieval sword. From there, the group expanded by acquiring land and property across Germany. Prosecutors allege that Fitzek and his deputies assumed divine status, issued legal decrees and built the appearance of statehood through offices and financial services that operated outside lawful oversight.
The structure mattered because it gave the organisation a way to extract money while presenting itself as an alternative civic system. Prosecutors say the KRD operated branches in Dresden, Ulm, Menden and Lutherstadt Wittenberg, offering unauthorised banking and insurance services alongside a registration office that produced false identity documents. A separate currency was also part of the setup.
Money flows, tax evasion and forged legitimacy
The financial accusations are extensive. Prosecutors allege the KRD took in about €10m over five years up to 2025 through unauthorised banking and insurance transactions, donations, gifts and fee-based seminars. None of that income was declared to tax authorities, and no income tax or social security contributions were paid on behalf of employees, according to the indictment.
The alleged fundraising methods were not limited to cash. The group is said to have accepted land and 7kg of gold, yet paid no gift tax. Prosecutors also say the organisation courted other companies with the promise that they could operate free of taxes and duties if they aligned themselves with the KRD’s system.
One sentence captures the core of the case: the alleged state was monetised as a business model.
That is where the criminal allegations become especially concrete. A fantasy political order is one thing; a revenue-generating network built around false documents, undeclared earnings and tax avoidance is another. The trial will test not just whether Fitzek’s movement rejected the republic in theory, but whether it turned that rejection into a functioning system of fraud.
Why German authorities saw a security threat
German intelligence agencies classify Reichsbürger as conspiracy theorists who deny the existence and legitimacy of the modern German state. The groups are heterogeneous, but authorities say a small minority are right-wing extremists and potentially violent. That distinction is important because the broader movement includes both oddball legal fantasies and a harder edge of anti-state extremism.
The KRD was banned in May 2025 by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, and Fitzek along with the other three suspects were taken into custody. The prosecution now seeks to show that the ban was not merely symbolic, but a response to an organisation that had moved from rhetoric into infrastructure.
Germany has been here before. In 2022, dozens of people, many of them Reichsbürger, were arrested in a separate plot to overthrow the government in Berlin. Prosecutors said that group had planned a violent coup, including kidnapping the health minister, in order to create “civil war conditions” and undermine democracy. Five people were jailed last year over that conspiracy.
Against that backdrop, the Düsseldorf case looks less like an isolated oddity and more like a legal effort to dismantle a persistent anti-state ecosystem. Intelligence services estimate that roughly 26,000 people belong to Reichsbürger organisations in Germany, a reminder that the movement’s appeal extends well beyond one self-appointed monarch.
What the court must now decide
Fitzek and his co-defendants, identified as Benjamin M, Mathias B and Martin S, face up to 10 years in prison. The legal questions are straightforward even if the ideology is not: whether they led a criminal organisation, whether the KRD’s banking and insurance operations were unlawful, whether documents and currency were forged, and whether millions in revenue were hidden from the tax system.
The case will also probe the degree to which the organisation functioned as a coordinated hierarchy rather than a loose protest group. Prosecutors have described a chain of command in which Fitzek and senior figures acted as rulers, not activists. If that structure is proven, the court will be dealing with a durable enterprise built to substitute fantasy for law while collecting real money from real people.
The trial in Düsseldorf is set to test the boundary between political delusion and organised crime, and the evidence already points to a network that aimed to do both: reject the state and profit from the rejection.