- Former member of the Bundestag testifies at the "Reichsbürger" trial
After a four-week hiatus, the Frankfurt terror trial involving Heinrich XIII. Prince Reuss resumed. Former Bundestag member Birgit Malsack-Winkemann was the first defendant to speak at length about the charges brought by the General Federal Prosecutor (GBA). A native of Darmstadt, she served in the Bundestag for the AfD from 2017 to 2021 and worked as a judge in Berlin for many years.
Criticism of the Trial and Distancing from Co-defendants
Before she began her statements about the defendants in the three trials in Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart, the 60-year-old expressed her dissatisfaction with the proceedings against the group. She described the trial as a story inflated by the GBA, in which predominantly elderly people were being held in detention without cause. "This is a scandal without precedent," she said on the 17th day of the trial. She couldn't explain the charges any other way, saying they must have been concocted by the GBA's imagination.
Some of the defendants were also in poor health or ill. "I don't know how many more deaths they want to be responsible for in this trial," she said to presiding judge Jürgen Bonk, referring to the already deceased defendant Norbert G.
Guiding Through the Bundestag
The GBA accuses her of smuggling other defendants into the Bundestag and scouting the building with them. She is said to have been a member of the so-called Union Council and responsible for the justice portfolio. She is also accused of actively trying to recruit more people for the Reuss union.
"The Bundestag tours had nothing to do with what followed," she stressed. It was a normal "tourist action." Malsack-Winkemann had guided hundreds of people through the Bundestag in her career and couldn't even say if certain members of the group were present during a tour. She sees these tours as a service of a Bundestag member to the people.
According to the GBA, the group planned an armed storming of the Bundestag to take MPs hostage and thus trigger a system change. Malsack-Winkemann emphasized: "There was no intention to ever storm the Bundestag. That's a fairy tale." This coup was supposed to happen on the signal of the so-called Alliance, which several defendants reported on in the group's meetings and allegedly had contacts with. Malsack-Winkemann described the Alliance as a "hoax" and a "chimera".
Three Trials Running in Parallel
In Frankfurt, nine defendants are accused of being members of a terrorist organization or supporting it. The defendants allegedly consciously accepted deaths in the planned coup, according to the indictment. Until the verdict, the defendants are presumed innocent. A total of 26 alleged conspirators must answer for themselves in two parallel trials in Munich and Stuttgart. The trial will continue on Thursday (August 15 at 9:30 am).
In her speech, Malsack-Winkemann expressed her frustration over the trial being held in Hessen, describing it as an unprecedented scandal. She served as a judge in Berlin prior to her time in the Bundestag.
Despite the accusations against her for guiding defendants through the Bundestag and being a part of the Union Council, Malsack-Winkemann insisted that these actions were just part of her duty as a Bundestag member and had no relation to the alleged terrorist plans. Hessen, being the location of the Frankfurt trial, was an integral part of her context during her statements.
