National Action: couple who named baby after Hitler found guilty

A neo-Nazi couple who named their baby son after Adolf Hitler have been convicted for being members of a terrorist group.

Adam Thomas and his girlfriend, Claudia Patatas were convicted after joining the far-right organisation National Action, which was outlawed in 2016.

Birmingham Crown Court heard the pair gave their baby the middle name “Adolf”, which self-confessed racist Thomas told jurors was done in “admiration” for the leader of Nazi Germany.

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Photographs shown to the jury featured Thomas “cradling his newborn son while wearing the hooded white robes of a Ku Klux Klansman”, says Huffpost.

Another picture showed the couple smiling in another shot with their baby as Thomas clutched a Swastika flag.

The court also heard that in conversation with another National Action member, Patatas said “all Jews must be put to death”, while Thomas told his partner, in a separate conversation, that he “found that all non-whites are intolerable”.

In an revelation, an investigation by The Jewish Chronicle found that Thomas attempted to convert to Judaism in 2015 in Jerusalem before “he was eventually turned away from its giur (conversion) programme”.

The Neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action, founded in 2013, “was outlawed under anti-terror legislation three years later after it celebrated the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox”, reports the BBC.

A third defendant, Daniel Bogunovic, from Leicester, was also convicted of being a member of National Action. The warehouse worker “was a leading figure in the organisation’s Midlands chapter”, says The Guardian.

The three defendants will be sentenced on 14 December.

The trial comes as leading counter-terror officers have warned the threat from far-right terrorism is growing and getting “more organised and more sophisticated” by the day.

Chief Superintendent Matt Ward, who heads one of the country’s dedicated counter-terrorism units, said: “It’s a risk that has been growing now for a number of years.”

“The use of internet and online ways to actually connect people from different parts of the country, together, connecting with organisations overseas, downloading information about weaponry and bomb-making,” he said.