The alleged co-founder of a neo-Nazi terror group dedicated to starting a race war in Britain has been likened to the Third Reich’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, a court has heard.

Ben Raymond, 32, is accused of setting up the “unapologetically racist” National Action group to wage a “white jihad” and race war in Britain.

Bristol Crown Court heard the group was established in 2013 and was banned under terror legislation in 2016 – joining the likes of the IRA, Isis and al Qaida – becoming the first far-right group proscribed since the British Union of Fascists in 1940.

Barnaby Jameson QC, prosecuting, said: “Terrorists have many faces. Some are obvious. Some are not. Some are harmless-looking, educated and articulate.

“Some you could pass in the street without ever suspecting they were the founder of an organisation so extreme it was banned under the terrorism legislation.

“Some you would never suspect they were steeped in extremist and fanatical ideology. Some you would never suspect they were pre-occupied with thoughts of extreme terrorist violence.

“Some you would never suspect they were continuously scheming to advance a violent terrorist agenda.

“Some of you would never suspect Ben Raymond, the defendant in this case.

“It was the defendant who coined the description ‘white jihad’. The word ‘jihad’ is borrowed from Islamic terrorism.

“The word ‘white’ denotes the stripe of this brand of terror – neo-Nazism – ‘white terror’ with a direct throwback to Nazi Germany.

“The terror celebrated by adherents of Hitler and the architects of the Holocaust. The terror of violent ethnic cleansing.

“For the defendant and his cohorts, the work of Adolf Hitler was, and remains, unfinished. The Final Solution to the Jewish question – to use Hitler’s words – remains to be answered by complete eradication.

“The ultimate aim of this secretive group of white jihadists was all-out race war or ‘Rassenkrieg’. Members of National Action were heavily armed and aggressive. The group was small, secretive and paranoid.”

The court heard National Action was equipped with more than just “knives and attitude” and had access to rifles, a pump action shotgun, a machete, a crossbow and CS gas.

Mr Jameson told the jury Raymond was the “public face” of National Action and was careful not to stockpile weapons or carry out attacks himself.

“His jihad was fought with words and images. He was, like Joseph Goebbels of the original cabal of Nazis, the natural head of propaganda,” he said.

“He gave media interviews, setting out the group’s virulent ethnic cleansing agenda to the media with sometimes transcendental calm. Other times his message was more direct.

“The defendant had a role – pre-ban and post – in the leadership and direction of the group, in its ideology, its activism, its recruitment and its operations security also known as ‘OpSec’.

“While others dealt with the day-to-day running of the group, the defendant became its propagandist and roving ambassador, acting as a point of contact with other neo-Nazi groups in Eastern Europe, Norway and the US.”

Mr Jameson alleged that after it was outlawed in December 2016, it morphed into a new group called NS131 – National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action – which Raymond was involved with.

He was also accused of creating images for a Midlands-based group called KKK Mafia.

Mr Jameson explained to the jury of seven men and five women the ideology of National Action was rooted in Hitler and based upon the Sturmabteilung, a Nazi paramilitary group active in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

He said National Action was against Jews, Muslims, people of colour, Asians, anyone gay, as well as liberals.

Mr Jameson said Raymond had links to other people convicted of being members of National Action, such as soldier Mikko Vehvilainen, Alice Cutter and Mark Jones.

He said he was also linked to Jack Renshaw – who plotted the murder of MP Rosie Cooper – and Zack Davies, who attacked an Asian dentist in a supermarket with a machete.

Raymond, of Beechcroft Road, Swindon, Wiltshire, is accused of seven offences – one of membership of a proscribed organisation contrary to Section 11 of the Terrorism Act and six of possessing a document or record of use to a terrorist contrary to Section 58 of the Act.

According to the charges, the material includes documents entitled “Ethnic Cleaning Operations”, “2083 – European Declaration of Independence by Andrew Berwick”, “Homemade Detonators by Ragnar Benson”, “TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook”, “Homemade Molotov Cocktail” and “Cluster Bomb”.

The trial continues.

A neo-Nazi couple who named their baby in honour of Hitler are due to be sentenced.

Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38, were found guilty after a trial of being members of the extreme right-wing organisation National Action, which was banned in 2016. The pair will be sentenced on Tuesday with three other men convicted of the same offence.Thomas and Patatas gave their child the middle name “Adolf” and had Swastika scatter cushions in their home. Photographs recovered from a search at their home showed Thomas cradling his new-born son while wearing the hooded white robes of a Ku Klux Klansman.

The couple of Banbury, Oxfordshire, will be sentenced on Tuesday, concluding a three-day hearing which started on Friday.

Patatas, a wedding photographer who was born in Portugal, also wanted to “bring back concentration camps” and after a 7-week trial were found guilty. Former Army applicant, Thomas was also convicted of having a terrorist manual, named the Anarchist’s Cookbook. This contained instructions on how to make a viable bomb.

The year is 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power is imminent. Days earlier and the Nazis had exploited the burning of the Reichstag, home of the German parliament, for votes.

Armed security forces patrolled public buildings. On the streets,  Sturmabteilung (SA) ‘brown shirts’ had their violence legitimised by decree. Political violence and intimidation, however, did not grant Hitler his parliamentary majority. The March 5 elections gave the Nazi Party 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 parliament seats out 647.

On March 10, 1933, Dr Michael Siegel visited a Munich police station on behalf a client. Dr Siegel was one of roughly 4,000 Jewish lawyers in Germany. They held senior positions in the court system, bar association and justice ministry. In 1933, racist laws pushed saw many lose their jobs. The indignity of this discrimination was was compounded by further arrests and violence.

Dr Siegel had entered a Munich police station on behalf of Max Uhlfelder, the Jewish owner of a large city-centre store. Nazi Party members had taken positions of office in Munich a day earlier. Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander, now commanded the Police Authority. The Swastika flew atop public buildings. Nazi paramilitaries had smashed Mr Uhlhelder’s shop windows and deported him to Dachau concentration camp.

Instead of listening to Dr Siegel’s complaint, the police assaulted him. SA ‘brown shirts’ had perforated Dr Siegel’s eardrum. The force of their punches had broken several teeth. They had cut his trousers from the knee down.

Dr Siegel was then made to walk the streets of Munich bloody and barefooted. Surrounded by ranks of SA paramilitaries, Dr Siegel wore a sign that read: “I will never again complain to the police”.

Some debate the actual wording of the sign. Dr Siegel had told his children that it read: “Ich bin Jude aber ich will mich nie mehr bei der Polizei Beschweren”(I am a Jew but I will never again complain to the Police).

Heinrich Sanden, the photojournalist who immortalised this humiliation, disagreed. Dr Siegel soon became an international symbol of the antisemitic persecution in Germany. He did not learn of the photo until the 1970s.

Despite the growing climate of antisemitic violence and discrimination, Dr Siegel and his family remained in Munich. He had passport revoked in 1934 and reinstated in 1935. Local farmers warned Dr Spiegel about the impending Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. He fled to Luxembourg and returned some weeks later, only to lose his legal license. Few Germans protested this flagrant discrimination.

At the start of 1939, the Siegel family left their home and found other accommodation. Their new ground floor served as an emergency synagogue,  the Nazis had razed the city’s main synagogue. Dr Siegel’s 18-year-old son Peter and 14-year-old daughter Beate soon emigrated to England.

Dr Siegel and his wife Mathilde sought asylum in Peru but were rejected. In a remarkable stroke of luck, a student teaching Dr Siegel Spanish was a nephew of the Peruvian Minister of the Interior.

The arduous road to Peru began in 1940. They travelled through Lithuania, Siberia, Russia and Japan before arriving in Peru. Dr Siegel took up work in a Lima bookstore. In the post-war years, he worked to establish an embassy for the Federal Republic of Germany in Peru’s capital, Lima. He soon became the Rabbi of the German-Jewish community in Lima. By 1953, Dr Siegel could again practise law in Germany, despite the geographical difference.

Dr Siegel helped German Jewish refugees in Peru and other parts of Latin America.

In 1971, at the age of 89, he received the Grand Cross of Merit of the German Republic ‘in recognition of his exceptional services to the state and people’. He accepted the award on behalf of all German Jews in Lima.

In spite of his growing age, Dr Siegel never stopped pursuing restitution cases. He died in 1979 at the age of 96.

Dr Siegel never forgot the ordeal he faced in Munich. In  a 1987 article, The Association of Jewish Refugees retold the story of Dr Siegel’s life and journey to Peru.

The authors, H.P. Sinclair and M.B. Green, wrote that Dr Michael Siegel had one thought in his mind: ‘I shall survive you all’. And he did. But according to Sinclair and Green, he bore no grudge against the German people. For he had known “too many decent ones for that“.

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For the first time since the end of World War II, a new annotated edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf will go on limited sale in Germany.

This edition from the The Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) offers 3,500 scholarly annotations. It seeks to challenge the ‘irresponsible’ earlier editions found in second-hand bookstores. Jewish groups are not with their concerns.

German justice ministers, however, have pledged to limit public access to stem neo-Nazi sentiment. Growing anxieties over the refugee crisis have provided extra succour to the populist far-right. Some expressed their far-right views to an actor dressed as Hitler. Neo-Nazis monopolise arson attacks against proposed refugee centres across Germany. At a Pegia rally in October, a guest speaker joked about putting Muslims in concentration camps. Germany recorded 1,596 antisemitic hate crimes last year. A vast majority of perpetrators expressed ‘right-wing’ views.

Hitler dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to Rudolf Hess in Lansburg prison, where both resided after the failed beer-hall putsch of 1923. Hitler’s chauffeur, Emil Maurice, had started the ghostwriting process, but his writing skills proved as poor as Hitler’s.

Mein Kampf outlined his racist worldview and political outlook. Autobiographical elements contained many inaccuracies to help create a positive image of himself.

Hitler proved an avid reader of Henry Ford’s antisemitic book ‘The International Jew‘. He had kept a life-size portrait of Ford above his desk before becoming German Chancellor in 1933. In December 1931, Hitler responded “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration“.

Henry Ford would later renounce his antisemitic writings, yet continued to admire the Nazi state. Shortly after after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany’s highest award for foreigners.

Hitler’s unfettered antisemitism is not the sole product of Ford’s writing. He also admired his assembly line modernisation of car production. Both men had also admired the notorious antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Alfred Rosenberg had introduced Hitler to it in the early 1920s. Extracts of the text had appeared in Ford’s Dearborn Independent newspaper in 1920.

It became a powerful propaganda tool for the Nazi party. Between 1919 and 1939, they had published at least 23 editions of the text. The Times newspaper first exposed it as an antisemitic plagiarism in 1921. In spite of renewed debunking, its poisonous legacy endures.

Both men were products of an era of American and European history that normalised antisemitism. As Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University noted:

“Anti-Semitism came from the top down from elite sources, and from the bottom up from populist sources. It came from the right, and the left. Small towns were no more hotbeds of anti-Semitism than large cities. It could be pretty much anyplace.”

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Allied forces handed the copyright of Mein Kampf over to the state of Bavaria. Unlike the swastika and other Nazi iconography, the book was never banned.

Under German law, copyright lasts for 70 years. From January next year publishers will have free access to the text. It will cost 59 euros and contains 1,948 pages.

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