German police have arrested eight suspected members of a right-wing militant group driven by racist ideology and conspiracy theories who had been training in warfare for the downfall of the modern German state, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
News of the arrests came as a 450-strong police operation was under way to dismantle the group, named by prosecutors as "Saechsische Separatisten," or Saxony Separatists.
"Our security authorities have thus thwarted at an early stage militant coup plans by right-wing terrorists, who were longing for a Day X to attack people and our state with armed force," Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.
The group targeted in Tuesday's operation was formed no later than November 2020, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement. "It is a militant group of 15 to 20 individuals whose ideology is characterized by racist, anti-Semitic and partially apocalyptic ideas," the statement added.
Convinced that Germany is nearing collapse, with the fall of government and society prophesied for an undetermined "Day X," the group had been training to use force to establish a new system in the country's east inspired by National Socialism, according to investigators.