German police arrest two dozen alleged conspirators in a hare-brained plot to overthrow the government

been an episode of “Babylon Berlin”, a drama in which the , a cabal of far-right military officers, plots a coup against the Weimar Republic to bring back the monarchy. At the crack of dawn on December 7th some 3,000 police and special-forces officers carried out raids in 11 states across Germany to arrest 25 suspected members of a group that was allegedly planning to topple the “deep state” the plotters believe is ruling the country. Even some of the characters involved resembled “Babylon Berlin” ones: there is a prince, a judge and a former commander of a special unit of the armed forces.The prosecutor’s office said that those arrested “aimed to overthrow the existing state system and replace it with their own form of state of which fundamental features are already prepared.” They know, it went on, that “they can only achieve their aims with military means and violence against representatives of the state. This includes murder.” The plotters were said to be united by a rejection of the federal republic’s liberal-democratic constitution, and made “concrete preparations” for its violent overthrow.