A former Miss Hitler beauty pageant contestant and her Nazi ex-fiance have been jailed after being convicted of belonging to banned far-right terror group National Action.
Alice Cutter, 23, was found guilty of membership of a terrorist group alongside her former partner Mark Jones and neo-Nazi ‘diehards’ Garry Jack and Connor Scothern following a retrial at Birmingham Crown Court in March.
Cutter, who entered a beauty contest as ‘The Buchenwald Princess’ in reference to the Second World War death camp, was jailed for three years today while Jones was handed a five-and-a-half year sentence.
Sentencing, Judge Paul Farrar QC told Jones he had played ‘a significant role in the continuation of the organisation’ after its ban in December 2016.
He said the organisation, which was formed in 2013, ‘was the most extreme Neo-Nazi organisation to appear in the UK for many decades.’
Alice Cutter (pictured) was sentenced alongside her ex-fiance Mark Jones for being members of the far-right terrorist group National Action at Birmingham Crown Court today
Cutter and her ex-partner Mark Jones (above) were convicted at Birmingham Crown Court in March
Cutter (left) met Jones (right) after posing for an online Miss Hitler competition run by the proscribed far-Right group – under the name The Buchenwald Princess
‘It was a revolutionary movement and was engaged in racist and political violence,’ Farrar added. ‘Its aims included the creation of a white state in the UK which would be ethnically cleansed.
‘It prepared violent propaganda and posted messages which said Adolf Hitler was right to murder gays and Jews.’
Cutter was told although she had never ‘held an organisational or leadership role’, she was a ‘trusted confidante’ of one the group’s leaders, as well as being in a ‘committed relationship’ with Jones.
Extreme right-wing group National Action, labelled ‘racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic’ by the then-home secretary Amber Rudd, was banned in December 2016.
Vegan neo-Nazi supporter Cutter had denied ever being a member, despite attending the group’s rallies in which banners reading ‘Hitler was right’ were raised.
Jurors heard how Cutter entered a Miss Hitler competition in June 2016 under the name ‘Miss Buchenwald’ – a reference to the Second World War camp.
She joked about gassing synagogues and using a Jew’s head as a football. She also texted a friend ‘rot in hell, b***h’ after MP Jo Cox was murdered.
Cutter exchanged racist and anti-Semitic messages with her then-boyfriend Jones, who was nicknamed ‘Grand Daddy Terror’ by fellow members.
The couple also sported ‘his-and-hers swastika knitwear’ while Cutter was pictured holding a semi automatic rifle and blades emblazoned with Nazi symbols.
Cutter had exchanged hundreds of messages – many racist and anti-Semitic – and attended various meetings with other members after the proscription
Cutter and her ex-partner Mark Jones have been convicted at Birmingham Crown Court
Vegan neo-Nazi supporter Cutter (left) met Jones (right) after posing for an online Miss Hitler competition run by the proscribed far-Right group National Action
Jones told jurors of his ‘feelings of admiration’ for Hitler, while the court heard he had a special wedding edition of Mein Kampf (above, Jones’ Nazi-themed illustrations)
The court was told how Cutter and Jones formed a relationship in 2016, later moving in together and getting engaged.
But the couple broke up after Jones cheated on her with a 16-year-old student he was trying to recruit.
Before their split, Jones and Cutter used the encrypted chat platform Telegram to talk with other members of National Action.
They were found to have made a series of racist and offensive posts, including against black people, Jews and the disabled before and after the ban.
The defendants vowed a ‘white Jihad’ in favour of ethnic cleansing and eradication of the Jews and held the ‘unapologetically racist’ ideology that ‘Hitler was right’.
Jones, a former member of the British National Party’s youth wing and a rail engineer, was described at trial as a ‘leader and strategist’ who played a ‘prominent and active role’.
The 25-year-old, originally the group’s London regional organiser, acknowledged posing for a photograph while delivering a Nazi-style salute and holding an NA flag in Buchenwald’s execution room during a trip to Germany in 2016.
Police said being a member of National Action was akin to belonging to other terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda or Daesh.
The group was outlawed following National Action members’ celebration of the murder of MP Jo Cox by extremist Thomas Mair on June 16, 2016.
But it continued underground after ‘shedding one skin for another’ and members set up an encrypted chat group called Triple K mafia in reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
Prosecutor Barnaby Jameson QC described them as ‘a secretive group of die-hard neo-Nazis with no compunction whatever of obtaining their objectives through terror.’
He added: ‘They are a group with admiration for Hitler and advocation of the Holocaust.
‘A group with a shared enthusiasm for ethnic cleansing and eradication of the Jews.
‘You will be forgiven for thinking that the ideology of Hitler had died out at Nuremberg. You would be wrong.
‘For the accused, Hitler’s work will always be unfinished. This is a group for which the final solution to the Jewish question remains to be annihilation.’
Pictured, a selection of Nazi-themed blades. Cutter and Jones were convicted at Birmingham Crown Court for being members of proscribed organisation National Action
Jones in Buchenwald concentration camp posing as a Nazi for photographs, 2016
Cutter and Jones, both of Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax, Yorkshire, described themselves in court as avowed National Socialists, but denied any wrongdoing
Garry Jack (left), 24, joined National Action six months before the ban. He had denied taking a photograph found on his phone of graffiti reading ‘gas the Jews’. Connor Scothern (right), 19, was a one-time practising Muslim before eventually joining National Action
Jack, 24, from Birmingham, had attended almost every meeting of NA’s Midlands sub-group.
He also had a previous conviction, from before the group was banned for plastering Birmingham’s Aston University campus with NA’s racially charged stickers, some reading ‘Britain is ours, the rest must go.’
Scothern, 19, from Nottingham, was ‘considered future leadership material’ and had distributed almost 1,500 stickers calling for a ‘final solution’ – in reference to the Nazis’ genocide against Jews.
Cutter was jailed for three years, while Jones received a five-and-a-half-year prison term.
Jack was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison, and Scothern was handed a sentence of detention for 18 months.
Speaking ahead of sentencing, the director of public prosecutions Max Hill QC described NA members as ‘diehards’ who ‘hark back to the days of not just anti-Semitism, but the Holocaust, the Third Reich in Germany’.