MANY Germans assume that nowadays it is others, especially Americans, who are prone to conspiracy theories and the rantings of paranoid megalomaniacs. By contrast Germans, forever chastened by a Nazi past, are doomed to boring responsibility. This makes the exceptions all the more fascinating. One is the tiny but growing movement of “imperial citizens”.

The so-called Reichsbürger are convinced that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) does not exist. In its place the old German Empire endures, which in their telling was never properly abolished and persists in the borders of either 1871 or 1937. There are nearly as many lines of pseudo-legal reasoning as adherents. One rests on the fact that the Allies never signed a peace treaty with Germany after the second world war. Another cites selectively from a decision by Germany’s supreme court in 1973 regarding an agreement between West and East Germany. The upshot, say Reichsbürger, is that the Federal Republic is really a limited-liability company based in Frankfurt and controlled by a Jewish world government based in America.

To the Reichsbürger the FRG’s police, judges, laws and tax agencies thus have no authority, and its documents carry no weight. At a traffic stop, say, a Reichsbürger will overwhelm the (usually puzzled) police with references to phony legal paragraphs and treaties while producing a driver’s licence or other identification issued by the Empire. The insignia vary because it is not clear even to the Reichsbürger who the true imperial government-in-waiting is. There are about 30 rival imperial chancellors, several princes and at least one king. One of the chancellors, a man named Norbert Schittke, also claims the English throne.

Though they draw ridicule even from neo-Nazis, the Reichsbürger are considered part of the extreme right. Many (though not all) are racist and anti-immigrant. Most are male and live in rural areas. Of the four regions that monitor their numbers, Brandenburg and Thuringia, both in eastern Germany, have the most, with several hundred identified in each. Worried about a rise in incidents, a think-tank in Brandenburg recently published a handbook for bureaucrats dealing with Reichsbürger.

The best approach, it advises, is to avoid responding at all. Typically, a Reichsbürger will only deluge a bureaucracy with verbose letters studded with obscure citations. Others get aggressive. Some 20 interrupted a trial this year and tried to “arrest” the judge. The first case of armed violence occurred in October. Wolfgang P., a hunter in Bavaria, had outed himself as a Reichsbürger in the course of disobeying local authorities. When officers approached his house to confiscate his rifles, he opened fire from the upper floor, injuring several and killing one. Locals told the press that the 49-year-old was a loner raised by his grandmother, whose death had apparently unhinged him.