Couple Who Named Baby After Hitler Jailed For Being Members Of Illegal Hate Group

A neo-Nazi couple who named their child after Adolf Hitler was sentenced to a combined decade in jail over their involvement with a right-wing extremist group.

Adam Thomas, 22, and his partner, Claudia Patatas, 38, were found guilty last month of being members of National Action, a right-wing group that has been banned in the United Kingdom since 2016. Following a trial at Birmingham Crown Court, a judge sentenced Thomas to six and a half years in jail and gave Patatas a five-year sentence, the Guardian reports.

The jury was told during the trial that the couple gave their son the middle name “Adolf” because of Thomas’ “admiration” of Hitler, according to the outlet.

In a series of damning photos, Thomas can be seen holding his infant son while wearing Ku Klux Klan robes. In another photo, Thomas and Patatas stand together, with Patatas holding their child and Thomas brandishing a flag with a swastika on it. The couple also had cushions decorated with swastikas in their home. The judge described their house as a “veritable shrine to extreme racism,” according to the Guardian.

Patatas, a wedding photographer from Portugal, once said to another National Action member that she wanted to “bring back concentration camps,” and had also stated that “all Jews must be put to death.”

Thomas, a former security guard at Amazon who had been turned away from the British Army after applying twice, described non-white people as “intolerable.”

He was also convicted on a majority verdict of having a terrorist manual — a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, a manual that contains instructions on how to build bombs.

Thomas and Patatas had participated in desecrating war memorials, and both had said that they were “willing to murder a mixed-race child” in support of the “vile regime” which they both worshipped, the judge said.

The couple were sentenced alongside four others who are also believed to be National Action members: Daniel Bogunovic, Joel Wilmore, Nathan Pryke and Darren Fletcher, the latter of whom reportedly admitted to being a member of National Action prior to the start of the seven-week trial.

Prosecutors claimed before a jury that Fletcher had taught his daughter how to mimic a Nazi salute, and then said in a text to Patatas, “Finally got her to do it.”

Prosecutors described Bogunovic, 27, as a “committed National Action leader, propagandist, and strategist,” and a judge sentenced him to six years and four months in jail. Wilmore, a 24-year-old cyber-security worker and “banker” for the group, was given five years and 10 months, while Pryke, a van driver who prosecutors claimed was a “security enforcer” for National Action, was given a sentence of five years and five months.

Wilmore and Pryke, along with Fletcher, admitted to being members of National Action before the trial.

U.K. home secretary Amber Rudd banned National Action and deemed it a terrorist organization two years ago, after one of its members murdered Jo Cox, a Labour Party Parliament member, and National Action supporters openly celebrated her killing online, according to The Independent, a U.K.-based newspaper.

“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 judge said during the couple's trial. “The eradication of those who you consider to be inferior because of no more than the color of their skin or their religion.”

The jury was told that the group is alleged to have used false names and other clandestine methods to communicate with each other, according to the West Midlands Police.

Detective Chief Superintendent Matt Ward, head of the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit, called the sentencing the result of “two years of painstaking work in the West Midlands and across the country to recognize and understand the threat of National Action.”

“These individuals were not simply racist fantasists; we now know they were a dangerous, well-structured organization,” he said. “Their aim was to spread neo-Nazi ideology by provoking a race war in the U.K .and they had spent years acquiring the skills to carry this out. They had researched how to make explosives, they had gathered weapons and they had a clear structure to radicalize others. Unchecked they would have inspired violence and spread hatred and fear across the West Midlands.”

[Photo Credits: West Midlands Police]