National Action: Neo-Nazi terrorist couple who named baby ‘Adolf’ jailed

Adam Thomas and Claudia Patatas jailed alongside four other members of terrorist group

A neo-Nazi couple who gave their baby the middle name “Adolf” in Hitler’s honour have been jailed.

Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38, were among six people sentenced for being members of the banned terrorist group National Action.

Thomas was jailed for six-and-a-half years and Patatas for five, after being convicted of membership of a proscribed organisation.

Birmingham Crown Court heard they 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 couple were sentenced alongside alongside fellow neo-Nazis Darren Fletcher, Daniel Bogunovic, Joel Wilmore and Nathan Pryke.

Judge Melbourne Inman QC told Patatas she was “equally as extreme as Thomas both in your views and actions”.

“You acted together in all you thought, said and did, in the naming of your son and the disturbing photographs of your child, surrounded by symbols of Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan,” he added.

The judge called National Action's aims “horrific”, adding: “Its aims and objectives are the overthrow of democracy in this country by serious violence and murder, and the imposition of a Nazi-style state which would eradicate whole sections of society by such violence and mass-murder.

"The eradication of those who you consider to be inferior because of no more than the colour of their skin, or their religion."

Swastika cushions found at the Banbury home of National Action members Claudia Patatas and Adam Thomas (Crown Prosecution Service)

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

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, were found guilty of membership of a proscribed group 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.

His close friend Fletcher, 28, of Wolverhampton, admitted membership of National Action and had trained his daughter to perform a Nazi salute as a toddler.

“Finally got her to do it,” he wrote to Patatas, later writing in a message group: “I always yell ‘sieg heil’, and the big smirk that comes across my daughter’s face at that point, always melts my heart.”

Judge Inman QC told Fletcher he was an "extreme member" even by National Action's standards, adding: "The depth of your racism is also evidenced by how you have been able to groom your own child.

“On your own evidence, you have been seeking to indoctrinate your own child in these vile beliefs.”

Claudia Patatas and her baby with friend Darren Fletcher (PA)

Bogunovic, 27, of Crown Hills Rise in 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, of Bramhall Road in 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 Pryke, a 26-year-old from March in Cambridgeshire, was the group's “security enforcer”.

Prosecutor Barnaby Jameson QC 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.

Even after National Action was banned in December 2016, the group continued to share vile messages and arrange meetings but changed the name of their chat group to “Triple K Mafia” – a reference to the Ku Klux Klan in the US.

The messages praised the Nazis, Hitler, the “final solution” and photos included that of men dressed in paramilitary-style clothes holding up or surrounded by National Action banners.

Wilmore was jailed for five years and 10 months, Bogunovic for six years and four months, Pryke for five years and five months and Fletcher for five years.

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.”

Det Ch Supt Ward said the Midlands chapter of National Action had been "dismantled" but the threat posed by the group continued.

He urged the public to watch out for its propaganda and new cells, which may operate under different names.

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.

The group was banned as a terrorist organisation for its glorification of violence and “racist, antisemitic and homophobic” ideology in 2016.