‘A scary time’: Nazi terror links revealed as disbanding sparks fears of violence

Australia’s biggest neo-Nazi group has been in direct contact with dozens of terrorists and extremist groups overseas and experts say they are more dangerous than ever as they officially disband to escape new hate laws.

An investigation by this masthead has uncovered fresh details of the extent of the National Socialist Network’s entanglement with terrorists and criminals, some of whom have given the neo-Nazi group money, and trained its members overseas.

National security experts say the relationships revealed between NSN members and key leaders of neo-Nazi terror cells suggest the Australians are deeply embedded in the far-right extremism movement internationally. And they say the NSN’s formal dissolution could now make its members more volatile than ever – freeing them from its discipline and giving its leaders, who are already plotting a return under the guise of a political party, more protection from culpability if those neo-Nazis turn violent.

Leaked chatlogs, photographs and other evidence analysed by this masthead show that members of the NSN have been in close contact with at least 30 neo-Nazi extremist groups overseas since forming five years ago. Nine of those groups are listed internationally as terror cells, and three of them – The Base, Atomwaffen and Terrorgram – are also banned in Australia.

Leaders of some of those terror groups have been described as friends by NSN leader Thomas Sewell, and they have appeared in the NSN’s closed chats on Telegram.

Among them are notorious Atomwaffen leader Brandon Russell, now jailed for plotting terror attacks in the US, who shared mass murder manuals with the NSN after Atomwaffen was banned in Australia, as well as British terrorist Benjamin Raymond of National Action, whom Sewell said had helped him plan how to evade a ban on the NSN in Australia.

When this masthead put the allegations to Sewell, he said he did not view these people or groups as terrorists and he claimed he was being persecuted by the Australian government.

Matt Kriner, a US extremism expert who consults for government agencies around the world, said the NSN had grown to “occupy a very similar space” as the since-outlawed network Terrorgram in connecting extremists globally, many of whom are recruited by multiple groups at once. The NSN served as a “public face” for the movement and had not committed acts of terror itself, he said. But “behind a very thin veil”, the Australian NSN appeared to have inherited the global neo-Nazi network when other leaders such as Russell had been locked up.

“The NSN are connected to the same people, sharing the same content,” Kriner said . “But they can’t be open because your laws are different. They’ve chosen Helly Hansen jackets over skull masks.”

Kriner has recently been assessing the NSN for Australian authorities. He separately analysed material on the group obtained by this masthead as well as the archives of anti-fascist researchers the White Rose Society.

Other researchers tracking neo-Nazis in Australia including Jordan McSwiney and Kaz Ross agree that the NSN and Sewell have had an outsized influence on the neo-Nazi movement globally, considering their relatively small numbers.

Until now, Australian authorities had said the group had not yet met the threshold of being caught actively plotting violence that would lead to its proscription as a terror group. The NSN shut down officially last weekend ahead of the Albanese government’s introduction of a new designation to instead ban it as a hate group.

“Disbanding won’t stop them. These men are committed Nazis,” said McSwiney. “This is a scary time, if someone in their orbit was going to do something.”

Already, the group’s leaders are planning their return under a new banner, telling followers to “trust the plan” and flagging another, more covert political party push, even as they wiped their official Telegram channels on Sunday night for the shutdown.

On livestreams with overseas white supremacist leaders just hours before those channels disappeared, Sewell said the NSN had always been an “accelerationist” group, committed to speeding up societal “decay”, as his followers posted tributes to the murderous US accelerationist group The Order before going dark online.

The hate speech crackdown banning the NSN was really his group’s “Magnum Opus”, Sewell said, forcing the government “to take the mask off too early while [we still] have the ability to mobilise as many white people as possible against this alien, treasonous regime”.

In the final moments of the group’s closed internal network, some members posted violent calls for revenge, including to stab people of colour, knowing the messages were about to be deleted. Screenshots of some of them have since been leaked to this masthead.

Some are still expected to show their faces, but not their usual black shirt uniforms, at the next anti-immigration rallies on Australia Day which the NSN has been helping organise. But police have warned off a number already on bail from attending, including neo-Nazis who allegedly attacked women at an Indigenous camp after the first March for Australia protests in August.

Such violent stunts, lionised in their propaganda, have helped propel the NSN into “the role of global neo-Nazi movement forerunner”, once held by the likes of Atomwaffen and The Base, White Rose researchers said.

Some connections between terror groups and the NSN have previously been exposed by this masthead, such as the extensive recruitment of its members by The Base, The Proud Boys and Combat 18. But others, including close ties to the terror cells Nordic Resistance Movement and Golden Dawn, as well as the extent of a previous “infestation” of satanists in the group, are now revealed in leaked internal communications.

The cache of evidence includes photos of Sewell wearing the patch of accelerationist terror cell The Base, and letters that NSN members said they sent to Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant in jail.

Kriner, who previously advised New Zealand authorities on listing far-right group The Proud Boys as terrorists, called it “alarming”.

Just this month in a public NSN channel on Telegram, this masthead observed a user posting a genuine copy of the terror manual Siege, which argues neo-Nazi groups can seed lone-wolf attacks without actually having to explicitly direct them. That user also posted a photograph displaying a tattoo of the satanic neo-Nazi group Order of Nine Angles, of which some NSN recruits have been members.

This masthead also found at least 11 “lone actors” charged with terrorism or serious violence had been members of the NSN or in communication with its leaders. That included the Australian Christchurch shooter, who donated money to Sewell shortly before carrying out the massacre on two New Zealand mosques in 2019, as well as a clutch of NSN members in Adelaide discovered with explosives and terror manuals during police raids in 2021.

More recently, US neo-Nazi Nikita Casap was in several NSN chats, before he murdered his parents last year to finance a plot to assassinate US President Donald Trump. And a Sydney soldier caught with child sex abuse material and terror manuals in August had been recently surveilled at NSN training.

Photographs and livestreams reveal Sewell’s neo-Nazis have also trained frequently overseas on “networking tours” with proscribed cells including Golden Dawn in Greece and Nordic Resistance in Sweden – groups that have carried out killings and other racial attacks.

Neo-Nazis overseas have donated money to NSN fundraisers and last year militias in the US and Canada organised letter-writing campaigns and protests outside Australian embassies demanding Sewell’s release from prison.

Sewell’s growing star power as a Nazi “manfluencer” has made him the headline figure at rare international “roundtables” of white supremacists held online, and the NSN has bragged of introducing key names in the scene, including connecting one of the most dangerous neo-Nazis in Europe, Russian-born Denis Nikitin, or “White Rex”, with The Proud Boys.

Closer to home, the NSN has considered merging with New Zealand neo-Nazi group Action Zealandia, according to White Rose. The groups have been photographed hosting members for training trips in their respective cities. Action Zealandia’s members have also been charged with a string of crimes, including sharing national security intelligence, and they have invited terror cells such as Nordic Resistance to join them for “the pilgrimage” following the route of “Saint Tarrant”, the Christchurch shooter, before he carried out the massacre.

Ahead of its planned “race war”, the NSN had been training its Australian recruits in combat, and quietly raising funds to build closed “white communities”, including, Sewell had flagged, a Nazi pub. It operated as a disciplined fight club, similar to neo-Nazi militias such as Patriot Front in the US and Casa Pound in Italy, with whom NSN members have also trained overseas.

On the livestream on Saturday, Sewell said he had also studied terror groups such as Nordic Resistance in creating the NSN, but he said the group had now served its purpose. He told his men not to gather in large numbers or to risk lengthy jail time under the new ban. While it was “game over” for the NSN, he said the group was itself just the latest iteration of the neo-Nazi push he had begun under earlier brands such as The Lads Society, and the militant Antipodean Resistance.

”I’m target fixated,” he said, pledging to “go back to the drawing board” to think up the next chapter.

Antipodean Resistance, led by Sewell’s right-hand man Jacob Hersant, formed out of the original international neo-Nazi accelerationist forum Ironmarch, inspired by National Action, and many of its members joined the first Australian cell of the terror group The Base and glorified Tarrant.

The group may yet take a softer political path than return to that brand of “agitation and propaganda” Sewell said they had “built into the NSN”.

But Kriner and other experts say this network, now cut loose from leadership, is “primed for violence”.

Many have violent criminal records, including Sewell, and the group’s rhetoric and threats against politicians and journalists had been escalating in recent months as senior neo-Nazis spoke of political solutions drying up.

Former AFP counterterrorism and national security expert John Coyne said most “shit-talking” online went nowhere, but for those already that far into the NSN’s cause, “the timeline from spark to fuse is pretty damn short”.

Coyne investigated previous white supremacist cells in Australia, and said it was “truly astounding” how the NSN had appeared to unite neo-Nazis behind one brand in a way he said “no group had done since the days of violent American militias like the Ku Klux Klan”.

“Sewell has been able to breadcrumb the journey to extremism for individuals, to normalise it, and yet not be picked up by law enforcement for any [lengthy] stretch of time” as others have, Coyne said. “Whether or not he intends to act … They’ve learned from the example of ISIS and Islamic extremism, which is you don’t fire the bullet yourself. But you create the right conditions.”

Sewell has publicly advocated for the rape of police; he has threatened journalists and politicians; and he has vowed to “become a terrorist and start killing people” if authorities come for any members’ children. His senior lieutenants, including Joel Davis, have called for white people to murder black people, and Hersant has filmed videos dressed in the white hood of the Ku Klux Klan, swinging a rope and chasing a man in blackface.

In their closed chats, NSN members have venerated racist mass murderers, shared instructions for 3D printing guns and accessing banned terror manuals, and discussed bashing people of colour. Prominent neo-Nazi Jimeone Roberts has written publicly for Atomwaffen’s online publishing arm, and others have appeared in the terror group’s “staff” chats.

At the same time, “cleanskin” influencer associates not officially part of the NSN had also been increasingly leaning in to the Nazi label, Kriner said. He called it a warning sign, “a bellwether” of how far the group had dragged the far-right to the extreme.

But the NSN had been trying to rebrand as “everyday Australians” in its final months too – covertly organising the March for Australia rallies, and signing up members for a planned “White Australia” political party.

In an email to supporters last week, the NSN said it had never advocated for terrorism or violence and nor had it broken the law. It accused the federal government of “moving the goal posts” to suppress political freedom.

Sewell spoke on Saturday of a populist political party emerging from the ashes of the NSN, without the Nazi branding or names of senior leadership attached.

McSwiney expects the NSN will follow a similar playbook to neo-Nazi groups in Europe, who have reformed as political parties after bans to claim cover as political expression. But those models also show that the neo-Nazi threat would continue, probably via an unofficial militant activist wing, he said.

Before it disbanded, the NSN had more than doubled in size in one year, as it aggressively recruited teenagers and men with access to money, influence and guns. That group of about 350 “diehards” were not renouncing Nazism, Kaz Ross said. Yet many have not been publicly identified as NSN members. “If something happens, perhaps on the fringes, we might not know they came from NSN at all,” she said.

As revealed by this masthead, a close friend of misogynist influencer Andrew Tate has also been helping the NSN artificially inflate its reach online of late using a Tate-style legion of unbranded accounts. Neo-Nazis can utilise those same channels now, along with those of its leaders, said McSwiney, even if official recruitment takes a hit.

ASIO has vowed to watch the group closely as it dissolves, and the AFP did not comment on its investigations into the group but it said it had recently launched taskforces to deal with the threats posed by neo-Nazis and other hate groups, including the targeting of politicians.

On Sunday, Sewell had already fundraised $100,000 in 24 hours, a “war chest” to challenge the new hate speech laws that he says killed his “little art project”, the NSN.

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