National Action: Neo-Nazi ‘trained daughter to perform Hitler salute and filmed it’, court hears

‘Finally got her to do it,’ Darren Fletcher boasted to fellow neo-Nazi

Darren Fletcher (left) with fellow National Action member Adam Thomas (West Midlands Police)

A neo-Nazi trained his daughter to perform a Hitler salute and filmed it to boast to his friends, a court has heard.

Darren Fletcher is one of six people being sentenced for being members of the terrorist group National Action, which was banned for its glorification of violence and “racist, antisemitic and homophobic” ideology in 2016.

Birmingham Crown Court was played footage of Fletcher’s daughter, who was a toddler at the time, raising her right arm above her head.

Prosecutor Barnaby Jameson QC said: “What Fletcher had succeeded in doing, we say, was getting his daughter to give a Nazi salute.”

Mr Jameson told the judge that the incident could lengthen Fletcher’s jail sentence and could provide “some suggestion Fletcher may have been trying to influence his child, or children”.

Fletcher, who chose not to attend court for Friday’s hearing, sent the footage to co-defendant Claudia Patatas with a message reading: “Finally got her to do it.”

Patatas and her partner Adam Thomas, who were convicted of National Action membership in the same case, gave their own baby the middle name Adolf in “admiration” of Hitler and had decorated their home with swastika cushions and a Ku Klux Klan flag.

The month after filming his daughter, Fletcher sent a message to a chat group for senior National Action members in which he likened the stepmother and the witch in children’s book Hansel and Gretel to Jews.

His message read: “My absolutely favourite part, though, is when the vile Jewish feminist witch gets shoved into the oven.

Adam Thomas and Claudia Patatas posed for pictures with their son alongside Nazi paraphernalia (PA)

“I always yell ‘sieg heil’, and the big smirk that comes across my daughter’s face at that point, always melts my heart.”

Fletcher – then known as Christopher Philips – was previously convicted of stirring up racial hatred after hanging a life-size golliwog doll on stage at an extreme right-wing music event in 2013.

He was jailed for 12 months for the stunt in Wales and handed a criminal anti-social behaviour order forbidding him from socialising with close friend Thomas.

Fletcher, of Wolverhampton, was jailed for a further eight months after breaching the order in May 2015, and has admitted a total of five violations.

Judge Melbourne Inman QC is to continue considering his sentence on Monday alongside Thomas, Patatas and fellow neo-Nazis Daniel Bogunovic, Joel Wilmore and Nathan Pryke.

All face up to 10 years in jail for membership of a proscribed group.

Photographs recovered from electronic devices showed Thomas cradling his newborn son while wearing the hooded white robes of a Ku Klux Klansman.

In conversation with another National Action member, Patatas said “all Jews must be put to death”, while Thomas had once told his partner he “found that all non-whites are intolerable”.

Former Amazon security guard Thomas and Patatas, a wedding photographer originally from Portugal, who also wanted to “bring back concentration camps”, were found guilty after a seven-week trial.

Thomas, a twice-failed Army applicant who told the court he once considered converting to Judaism, was also convicted on a majority verdict of having a terrorist manual that contained instructions on making “viable” bombs.

Bogunovic, from Leicester, was described in court on Friday as a “committed National Action leader, propagandist and strategist”.

He was also found guilty of inciting racial hatred by spreading National Action stickers at Birmingham’s Aston University complex in July 2016.

Wilmore, from Stockport, was a cyber security worker described as the midlands’ National Action cell’s “banker”. He also pleaded guilty to possessing bombmaking instructions.

Van driver Nathan Pryke, a 26-year-old from Cambridgeshire, was the group’s “security enforcer”.

Mr Jameson said all six defendants had remained members of National Action after it was banned and taken part in the organisation’s chat groups, which were staging posts for comments of ”virulent racism, particularly from Thomas, Patatas and Fletcher“.

“Leaders Pryke, Wilmore and Bogunovic were more circumspect in their views but on occasion the true depth of their racial hatred leeched out,” he added.

In a previous hearing, he said the group followed a belief system “born out of fanatical and tribal belief in white supremacy”.

“It is a terror that regards anyone who falls outside a cult of violent white racial supremacy as sub-human,” he added.

National Action members have been linked to a series of terror plots and one of its supporters tried to behead an Asian man in 2015.

Bogunovic was connected to another regional National Action cell whose members were convicted earlier this year.

They included a British Army soldier who was trying to recruit troops for a race war and had stockpiled weapons.

Detective Chief Superintendent Matt Ward, head of the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit, said the group had spent years planning for a race war.

“These individuals were not simply racist fantasists; we now know they were a dangerous, well-structured organisation,” he added. “Their aim was to spread neo-Nazi ideology by provoking a race war in the UK and they had spent years acquiring the skills to carry this out.

“They had researched how to make explosives. They had gathered weapons. They had a clear structure to radicalise others. Unchecked they would have inspired violence and spread hatred and fear.”

The sentencing hearing will continue on Monday.

Additional reporting by PA