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A “fanatical” neo-Nazi couple who named their baby son after Hitler have been convicted of membership of a terrorist group.
Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38, were found guilty of being members of the extreme rightwing organisation National Action, which was banned in 2016.
A jury at Birmingham crown court was told the couple, from Banbury, Oxfordshire, had given their child the middle name Adolf, which Thomas said was in “admiration” of Hitler.
Photographs recovered from their home showed Thomas, formerly an Amazon security guard, cradling his newborn son while wearing the hooded white robes of a Ku Klux Klansman.
Thomas, formerly of Erdington in Birmingham, and Patatas, a photographer originally from Portugal, were found guilty after a seven-week trial.
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.
Jurors were told Bogunovic already had a conviction from earlier this year for stirring up racial hatred after being part of a group that put up offensive stickers at Aston University in Birmingham.
Thomas, a twice-failed army applicant, was also convicted of having a terrorist manual, the Anarchist’s Cookbook, which contained instructions on making “viable” bombs.
The Crown’s case was that after being banned by the government in December 2016, National Action simply “shed one skin for another” and “rebranded”.
Jurors heard evidence of social media chats involving Thomas, Patatas and Bogunovic, discussing what prosecutors have alleged was the banned group’s continuing operations under a different name.
The jury also heard that Thomas and Patatas plastered National Action stickers in public locations after the ban, while Bogunovic was calling for a “leadership” meeting in a chat group for senior members in April 2017.
Thomas told the trial he shaved his head from the age of five and that his stepfather was in the band Skrewdriver.
Asked by his barrister, Frida Hussain, “Are you a racist?” Thomas replied: “Yes.” But he added: “It is something I do not tend to think about any more, something I want to put behind me.”
He denied being a member of National Action following its banning by the home secretary in December 2016. Thomas said he had “admiration” for Hitler, which was why he chose it as his child’s middle name.
Thomas said during his school years he had come to the attention of the Prevent counter-radicalisation programme, which took him to see a female Holocaust survivor. Thomas said: “She told me she was evacuated from Germany to Britain and I couldn’t see that as being a Holocaust survivor, at the time.”
He said the photograph of him holding his child while wearing KKK robes was “just play”.
“They were not put up on some website or used to promote some agenda or ideology.” he said.
Thomas, from Oxfordshire, said of chat groups where he had made antisemitic and racist remarks to other alleged National Action members: “That was entertaining to me at the time. It was funny, at the time.”
Asked whether his parents had been “extremists or racists”, he said: “They were common racists.”
Thomas, who was twice turned down by the army because of an Asperger’s diagnosis, said his beliefs in white nationalism began at an early age and his racist views led to his expulsion from mainstream school aged 14.
He added: “I’d say aged five, mostly because of my stepfather. My stepfather was in the band Skrewdriver. The band was widely known as a white power band. It had very racist views.
“When I was five, he’d talk to me about that and shave my head as well.”
Thomas said his paternal grandfather was from Derry in Northern Ireland and had had “a positive view of Hitler and the Nazis” and used to deliver a “Hitler salute” when Thomas visited as a boy. He added that his great-grandfather was a supporter of the British Union of Fascists.
Three other men who had been due to stand trial alongside the trio, admitted being National Action members before the trial began.
Thomas’s close friend Darren Fletcher, 28, of Wednesfield, West Midlands, Joel Wilmore, 24, of Stockport, Greater Manchester, and Nathan Pryke, 26, of March, Cambridgeshire, will be sentenced later.
Counter-terrorism detectives believe those convicted on Monday, and the three who had pleaded guilty earlier, were members of a Midlands cell of an extreme rightwing group committed to violence.
DCS Matt Ward, of the West Midlands counter-terrorism unit, said investigators had taken out a Midlands chapter of National Action.
Ward said the banned group was more dangerous than race hate groups seen before. He said: “National Action is a much more sophisticated and organised set-up than we have seen with other rightwing groups.”
He said it used sophisticated online encryption and targeted the military and those versed in IT skills as potential recruits. “The greatest threat they posed was trying to radicalise and recruit others,” he said.
“There was an incredible amount of work to dismantle them. It took our full range of capabilities.”
He said some of the group’s activities started with putting up propaganda such as stickers, as they tried to win recruits for their race war.
Ward said they had the desire to set up white-only enclaves and wanted to use violence so “community turns on community”.
Ward said National Action followers would try to hide by changing the name of their group, but he echoed a concern among fellow counter-terrorism investigators that the extreme far right was a growing terrorist threat that represented a danger to Britain’s national security. “It won’t go away,” he said.
Furthermore, it was gaining support from overseas. “The shared ideology of neo-Nazism exists across Europe,” he said.
Ward said there was no evidence that those convicted and those who pleaded guilty were engaged in plotting an attack.
