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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie.
Chapter 2: What does it mean to be a Nazi in Australia in 2026?
What does it mean to be a Nazi in 2026? As extremist groups adapt to the digital age, crime reporter at the age Sharon Grotch examines how they attract followers online, who they're targeting and the symbols, language and online communities that help these movements grow. This is Australian True Crime.
We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. All right, so we need you to tell us, please, where are we in 2026? What does it mean to be a Nazi in Australia?
I guess it means exactly how it sounds. These are Hitler-sher-worshipping, swastika-waving, out-and-proud Nazis.
Chapter 3: How are extremist groups adapting to the digital age?
I hate Jews. They want to deport people of colour and build their own white-only societies, you know, run by men, of course.
But I guess at the moment, Nazis in Australia, they're in a bit of a strange moment in their evolution where, because the government has cracked down on them again, they've sort of scuttled back into trying to appear like everyday Aussies, just concerned about immigration numbers, you know, fed up with all the woke
lefty politics let's go boo the welcome to country nothing to see here lads and look they've pulled this tactic a few times i mean in the 80s you had um guys out there in their black combat boots saying we're technically not nazis we're white fascists um
I think it was during the, about a decade ago, during the sort of second coming of Pauline Hanson, we had Nazis out there targeting mosques with really nasty stunts, like fake beheadings, but still saying very firmly, we're not Nazis. And now they're more organised than ever. They're growing here in Australia.
And they've sort of ramped up to the point where they've gone from their little stunts in their black bucket hats, to proper stunts that are getting serious media attention. So, you know, obviously, like, you know, a few hundred diehard Nazis is not enough to enact their coup that they are planning.
I'm sort of shocked, to be honest, and I think I'm pretty engaged with the news and with what's going on around the place, but I think people of my generation, I'm in my early 50s and I... It feels like most of my life, the term Nazi has been almost a joke because it's so ridiculous that anyone would actually be a Nazi. We used to fling it around about John Howard.
People used to say Margaret Thatcher was a Nazi. It was like... a way of saying ultra-conservative and a way of saying we didn't like someone. But it never occurred to me that anyone ever again would actually think of themselves as Nazis. I think because the Third Reich ended in such humiliation for everybody who followed Nazism. I mean, it was an absolute debacle. I think it's an understatement.
It was a wipeout. Right? In every way, on every level. They came out looking like thugs.
fools racist fools who just followed a lunatic and so it was win or die right and that's not that's not a great philosophy is it and the anti-semitism of it all was ridiculous you know when we when we really looked into the pseudoscience they were using to justify it all it was stupid and you know what so for me i always think of nuts calling someone as a nazi as a bit of a
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Chapter 4: What tactics do neo-Nazi groups use to recruit followers?
Yeah. They're not actually Nazis. And it is tempting when you see these guys LARPing around, it is tempting to sort of laugh at them, like aren't they ridiculous? But the reason I got interested is because these guys are, you know, they're serious dangerous people. A lot of them have got really serious criminal convictions or they've got serious ties to terrorists overseas.
I mean, I discovered they're linked to about 30 extremist groups overseas. Like, you know, they had dealings with the Christchurch shooter before he went off and did his massacre in New Zealand. So it's sort of we've reached the point where we can't laugh at them anymore. And that is almost, it's a strange sort of beast. It's kind of what they want.
They think, oh, now people are taking us seriously. But yes, certainly they are dangerous and they are growing. Even with this kind of new bit of theatre they've sort of carried out with the government really cracked down quite hard. And so they said, look, oh, you know, we're disbanding formally. Nothing to see here, lads. It's all good. But, of course, they're still there.
So it's almost like every few years they crash in hard as Nazis and they might do a tactical retreat. But with every wave of this, they're eating the shore. And that idea of the term Nazi once being unthinkable, Now, like, you know, back in the day, you'd call a guy and say, hey, mate, you know, what's with the swastika tattoo that you just sort of hid under the bed there? Are you a Nazi?
And they'd fall over themselves to say, of course, I'm not a Nazi.
How dare you call me that? But now it's the opposite. That's a really good point. I'm seeing photographs, you know, on socials, people upload them a lot of Australian men mainly wandering around with proper Nazi tattoos.
tattoos that is mind-blowing to me on a calf a swastika on a calf this bloke's from the sydney suburbs what on earth yeah and and it's outlawed in a lot of places now recently because we've seen so much of this but there are still loopholes and people are more they a lot of them seem to be more concerned with nosh sort of denouncing the nut Nazis than separating themselves from them.
So they've done very well at eating the shore, charging through as all-out Nazis mask off and dragging the right further to the extreme.
Well, in that way, they're definitely taking one out of the original Nazis' handbook, aren't they? I mean, if we look 100 years ago, the same thing was happening in Europe. We'd have a So, you know, we'd have the riots, we'd have the big push and then they'd pull back. But really more hearts and minds had been won during that big push forward.
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Chapter 5: How has the perception of Nazis changed in Australia?
That's Australian only, but it's one of the biggest neo-Nazi groups in the world. So they have chapters all around the country. And look, there are about a few hundred members. So we're still not talking huge numbers here.
But during the past year, they had a surge in recruitment, largely driven by the March for Australia anti-immigration rallies that we revealed that the Nazis were secretly running. It kind of funneled all these recruits in. So
The numbers are actually a little bit unclear because by the time we were starting to see these new faces come through and every time you'd see these guys out in the field, there'd be new faces. Unfortunately, you know, by the time all that kind of happened, they'd gone underground and they disbanded because of this new crackdown.
But they do use those sorts of cultural events, don't they? Like you said, the March for Australia, also the protests against the Indigenous Voice for Parliament, I believe was a moment for them, a recruitment moment.
Yes, and this is a really good example, actually, because this was a coordinated stunt that they had thought about for months before. We called it out at the time, but they still had a great win on the day because within hours we're saying, look, here's a Nazi booing in the darkness of the dawn service of Anzac Day.
And we still had our then Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, saying, you know what, they've got some points left. welcome to country, maybe the place for it isn't here. So that was a pretty good win for them. And then we saw it happen again this year, only people didn't really call them out to the same extent. But this year we saw the same coordination online.
They're talking about, oh, patriots are on route, boys, you know, scatter through the crowd. So it looks like an organic protest. It looks like people in the crowd are rising up, but really it's like 50 of my mates are just strategically placed through the crowd. They did face a little bit of opposition this year. A few older veterans, you know, pushed them around a bit, were not happy.
Quite a few people were offended. And some of the neo-Nazis who were charged last year are actually in court this month facing sort of the consequences of that. Fairly minor charges. What are the consequences? What's the ultimate sort of punishment? Oh, they've been charged with things like offensive behaviour. So we're still sort of seeing that play out in the courts here.
Other ways that they look to recruit both men and women that I read about in some of your writing, mothers' groups. Tell us about that.
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Chapter 6: What role does social media play in the spread of extremist ideologies?
Certainly they're bigger than they've ever been. They're more organised. All the experts have told me this is really worrying. The thing that worries me too is that now that they have disbanded, there's a lot of people that were in their orbit cut loose suddenly from the organisation. And so it's a bit of a dangerous moment for lone wolves.
And we know that they've had so much interaction with dangerous people, convicted terrorists, already when just before they disbanded. Bondi happened, the Bondi shooting, which was awful.
And then within a couple of days of that, I found a Discord server where there was just like a chat room online where there were heaps of these Nazis all chatting and they were sort of using it to informally organise the next March for Australia rally. And they were already talking about let's get a van and kidnap the Prime Minister. This is the way I can get bombs from Amazon.
So the cops ended up raiding them because, like, some of the things they were saying and the threats they were making were wild. Like... Prime Minister Albanese, he had to actually come out and acknowledge the threats after we ran the story because the cops had raided a few of them. And a few of them were ex-NSN members, mostly in Sydney.
There were then threats made against the Invasion Day rallies on January 26, and most of those were foiled and didn't come to anything. But, of course, in WA... Police say a white supremacist did throw a bomb into the crowd. It didn't go off. But that happened. There hasn't been a huge hullabaloo about that. But certainly that was a pretty scary moment.
Over the past year, I've noticed that they're not just aggressively recruiting vulnerable teenagers and really upping the propaganda online. But they're also, they seem to be drawing in men of influence.
So people with useful connections, whether it's to money, whether it's to guns, whether it's maybe someone's got some property up in the bush where they can train with weapons and no one will notice. And Thomas Sewell, the leader, has been bragging more and more about getting in big investors and connections for the group.
When these new hate speech laws came in, within a few hours, he'd already fundraised over $100,000 so he could challenge it in the High Court. And of course, they still have their project to create a neo-Nazi political party, which we revealed back in April.
Would that be legal under Australian law? It is.
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Chapter 7: How are neo-Nazi groups infiltrating other communities?
So he knew to take this quite seriously and, you know, I've since heard that they're even getting legal advice now when they post to Telegram, some of them. So they are taking it quite seriously. But it's kind of an interesting moment because for years before One, they've wanted nothing to do with politics.
They've been, you know, of the view, the accelerationist neo-Nazi terrorist view that there's no point trying the political route. What we have to do is accelerate the collapse of society. So everything we can do to mess with society is a good thing. They used to call it, you know, they still do, they call it riding the tiger.
So you basically, you jump on the tiger's back, the tiger's the state, it's got big fangs, but if you ride it hard enough, you make it run itself to exhaustion, then you can defeat the tiger and you can slide off its back to victory.
And then what, though? What does victory look like if the state collapses? Then what?
It looks like their state. Right, okay. Their white Australia where they've deported people of colour. There's elder statesmen within the movement that would lead it.
Well, it sounds like America in a way. I mean, how close is this all associated to? As you're talking, it feels like, oh, it feels like America's just a few steps ahead of us right now.
Well, it's like the Nazis in Australia, weirdly, have become a little bit of like a leadership position in the global movement. Normally, it's the US because out of the US, I mean, we saw really classic and we still do see really classic homestead white nationalist movements. There was the Order movement.
I think in the 80s, and they went around like robbing banks and killing people ahead of their planned race war. And, you know, again, they're an inspiration for our guys here. But now it's Australia's sort of managed to kind of inch in, at least I think in terms of maybe coverage attention.
But America has a government that is employing a lot of these techniques itself now. It feels like that tiger's been ridden pretty hard to the point that it's like they have, you know, a sort of an army, a private army that the leader has given these powers to. They're obsessed with the idea of deporting people, non-white people. It seems like all of these...
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