Well-connected European nazis and extreme conspiracy theorists are under investigation after heavily-armed police raided a weapons training camp in Austria ten days ago. Attention has focussed particularly on the involvement of a senior officer in the Austrian army.
On Saturday 11 October, 19 men and women gathered at a rural property in Vorchdorf, district of Gmunden, Upper Austria for what they would later describe as “weapons exercise”.
A witness called the police when they saw individuals handling assault-rifle type weapons.
When police units, including the “Cobra” task force and rapid intervention group, arrived at the scene, many of those present rushed into the house. Investigators found around 50 semi-automatic weapons and other firearms and weapon components.
Army general staff
Thomas Reiter, a 53-year-old colonel from Salzburg serving on the general staff of the Austrian Army, is among the central figures in this investigation. He has been suspended on full pay since the police raid, which he reportedly tried to obstruct.
Austrian anti-fascists are perturbed by Reiter’s continued employment in a senior Army post, because his extremist views have been public knowledge for many years.
In 2018 he gave a racist speech at a Kameradschaftsbund meeting in Braunau, Upper Austria, that was investigated by state prosecutors, but the case was dropped. The Kameradschaftsbund, set up in 1951, is an association of Austrian World War II veterans.
Notorious activist
Since earlier this year, Reiter has been vice-president of a right-wing “Institute for Free Research and Promotion of Human Rights”.
This institute’s president is a notorious far-right activist, Karlheinz Klement, an ex-official of the mainstream Austrian right-wing party Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and several later breakaway parties.
Klement is also a business partner with Reiter in a company called Alterion which supposedly specialises in “alternative energy systems”.
Klement’s many far-right activities included organising a meeting with members of the neo-nazi group European Action to hear a lecture by its co-founder, the Swiss-German holocaust denier Bernhard Schaub.
Teflon-coated
For some reason Schaub seems to have a Teflon coating allowing him to associate with any number of banned groups and jailed individuals.
He was one of a five-member committee created in Tehran in 2006 by then Iranian President Ahmadinejad to promote Holocaust denial worldwide.
Since then, Schaub has wandered through the European nazi scene, with people all around him being raided, arrested or jailed, while he remains unscathed himself.
Schaub (now 71) is detested by some ex-comrades because of his affair with the very young daughter of a fellow Swiss nazi.
He became an adviser and spokesman for the eccentric aristocrat Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, who was the leader of an alleged coup plot in Germany that has led to many arrests and continuing police raids across several countries.
The “Reuss Group” have spent almost three years in pre-trial custody. One of the alleged conspirators died a few weeks ago after being released from detention on health grounds.
Violent nazis
This was Hildegard Leiding, a former AfD activist and astrologer who was listed as “trans-communications minister” in Reuss’s planned government to be installed after the coup.
Readers might be forgiven for treating the Reuss Group as a joke, but the German and Austrian police are justified in taking them and their associates very seriously.
Large quantities of weapons have been discovered since the first raids on the Reuss Group in December 2022.
British holocaust deniers
Their broader network included several violent nazis. Bernhard Schaub promoted his and Reuss’s views at meetings in Schwarzenborn, central Germany, at the former home of convicted nazi terrorist Manfred Roeder.
The events were hosted by veteran British Holocaust denier Michèle Renouf who was also a member of Schaub’s European Action before it was banned.
Other Britons involved included the BNP and NF veteran Richard Edmonds (who died in 2020) and the Holocaust denier and Heritage & Destiny writer Peter Rushton. They were, and are, active networkers across the most extreme sections of European national socialism.
Racist dating agency
Another of Schaub’s associates is Christiane Horn, alias Liv Heide, who runs the international racist “dating website” WhiteDate.
Ms Horn now lives in the small town of Altenholz, near Kiel, but when she began her radicalisation ten years ago (already in her mid-40s) she was living in Paris and married to a Jewish man.
Ever-paranoid European nazis are now panicking because their data at WhiteDate was recently leaked to anti-fascists.
They don’t know whether to trust their antisemitic instincts and blame Ms Horn, or look for other conspiracies and blame Schaub and his crank network of gun-obsessed coup plotters.
