The parents with KKK robes and a baby called Adolf
CLAUDIA Patatas and Adam Thomas, convicted yesterday of being members of National Action, were so devoted to the far Right that they gave their baby the middle name Adolf in ‘admiration’ for Hitler.
The couple also posed with the infant while holding a swastika flag and kept an arsenal of weapons a few feet from his crib.
Jurors heard how the racist fanatics adorned their home on the edge of Banbury, Oxfordshire, with Nazi and Ku Klux Klan flags, cushions and pennants.
Thomas, 22, a former Amazon security guard, proudly told the jury how his stepfather was a member of the notorious 1980s white power band Skrewdriver. He also recalled his grandfather greeting him with a Nazi salute when he was about five.
Meanwhile, the KKK robes that Thomas wore in a series of photos shown to the jury – including one with his baby – were inherited from his great-grandfather, a supporter of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.
Born in Sutton Coldfield but raised in Birmingham, Thomas spent much of his childhood with his maternal grandparents, but he continued to see his parents.
The extremism that would lead him to National Action was already so ingrained in him that at school he was referred to the Government’s Prevent strategy after teachers overheard him racially abusing fellow pupils at the age of 13. The only white child in his class, he was eventually expelled and went to a special school.
Thomas left without any GCSEs but in a bizarre turn of events two years later the self-confessed Holocaust denier moved to Israel, where he lived first in a kibbutz and then a college where he tried to convert to Judaism.
He met Patatas via the encrypted Telegram messaging app – also favoured by Islamic State recruiters – after flying back to the UK in 2016. Patatas was born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal, and graduated in English and Germanic philology. She had no known connections to the far Right.
Patatas moved to the UK in 2010 to live with a pagan far Right activist she met on a camping holiday. She fell under Thomas’s spell in November 2016 and soon became pregnant with their child.
Police said the couple’s baby son, looked after by his mother throughout the trial, will now be the subject of ‘normal safeguarding procedures’ but it was for social workers to decide on his future.