This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A woman accused of membership of the banned neo-Nazi terror group National Action entered a “Miss Hitler” beauty contest in a bid to recruit female members, a court has heard.

Alice Cutter, 22, is alleged to have won the National Action competition using the nickname “Buchenwald Princess”, in reference to the Nazi death camp.

Cutter is standing trial alongside her partner, Mark Jones, who is accused of posing for a photograph while giving a Nazi salute in Buchenwald’s execution room in Germany.

Jones, 24, and Cutter, of Sowerby Bridge near Halifax, deny being members of National Action between December 2016 and September 2017.

Two other men, Garry Jack, 23, of Shard End in Birmingham, and 18-year-old Connor Scothern, of Nottingham, deny being members of the group between the same dates.

Opening the case at Birmingham crown court on Wednesday, prosecutor Barnaby Jameson QC said Jones flew to Germany to visit the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 2016.

Jurors were shown a picture of two men standing in the camp’s execution room holding a National Action flag. Jameson said: “Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp that stood out, even by the standards of Nazi concentration camps, for its depravity.

Two members of banned neo-Nazi group National Action jailed Read more

“Like Auschwitz, Buchenwald is a permanent museum to honour the victims and remind the world of the horrors perpetrated in the name of nazism.”

Cutter is alleged to have entered the Miss Hitler beauty contest in June 2016, days after the murder of the MP Jo Cox.

Jameson described the competition as a “publicity stunt” to raise the group’s profile. The jury was shown a picture alleged to show Cutter wearing a National Action mask, which was posted online.

The court heard that in an interview to enter the contest, Cutter said: “It is important to me that there’s a balance of feminine to masculine in the movement – without feminine involvement, what would a movement be? A sad sausage fest with no appeal?

“Women are the most important figures when it comes to teaching and raising the next generation to be strong and proud. We need to step up, be the lionesses we ought to be and rip apart the hyenas laughing at us as we get raped, beaten, brainwashed and de-feminised en masse. Hyenas have no part in our pride and never will.”

Jameson told the jury the defendants were seeking to spread terror from “an ideology so warped, so extreme and so twisted, its continued existence will be shocking to many of you, if not all”.

He added: “It is the terror of pathological racial prejudice … This case is about a fellowship of hate. A hate so fanatical and a fellowship so defiant that the accused would sooner break the law than break their bonds of hate.”

The trial continues.