BERLIN — German police have arrested eight suspected members of a neo-Nazi 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 Nov 5.

News of the arrests came amid a 450-strong police operation to dismantle the group, named by prosecutors as "Saechsische Separatisten", or Saxony Separatists, which has the abbreviation SS, the same as the Nazi party's elite militia.

"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.

Media reports linked one of the suspects to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) — which commands as much as 18 per cent support in national polls, behind only the centre-right opposition —although the party itself insisted it had nothing to do with such a group.

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