The founder of a neo-Nazi group that infiltrated the police and army has gone on trial accused of founding a second secret organisation after it was banned by the government.

“Innocuous-looking” university student Alex Davies co-founded National Action, which described itself as a “white jihadist group” and was dedicated to all-out race war, a court heard.

The group encouraged members to join the police and army, as they toured the country launching “flash demonstrations” in which they proclaimed: “Hitler was right”.

National Action was modelled on the Nazi SS stormtroopers and was proscribed by the government in December 2016.

Davies, 28, from Swansea, South Wales, has gone on trial at Winchester Crown Court accused of being a member of a proscribed organisation, National Action, by setting up an off-shoot following its ban.

Davies was ‘extremist’s extremist’, court told

Barnaby Jameson QC, prosecuting, said the group sought to “place its people covertly in positions of authority” and members included Ben Hannam, who joined the Metropolitan Police, and Mikko Vehvilainen, a serving soldier.

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He told jurors Davies was a “particularly active recruiter” whose work as a “recruiting sergeant” continued after National Action was banned.

“His neo-Nazi ideology was among the most extreme of anyone within National Action – Mr Davies was an extremist’s extremist,” Mr Jameson added.

While his co-founder, Ben Raymond, was the propagandist who acted like Joseph Goebbels, Davies was similar to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the prosecutor said.

National Action ‘direct throwback to the original Nazism of the 1930s’

The court heard Davies does not dispute that he was a co-founder and member of National Action before the ban but says the organisation ceased to exist following proscription in December 2016.

“The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that not only did the defendant remain a member of the continuity group after the ban, he founded his own offshoot by the name of NS131,” Mr Jameson said.

He described National Action as a “direct throwback to the original Nazism of the 1930s.”

“For the defendant and his cohorts, the work of Adolph Hitler was, and remains, unfinished,” Mr Jameson said.

Davies had posed alongside another man, giving a Nazi salute, in the execution chamber of the Buchenwald concentration camp, in an image that caused outrage in Germany, the court was told.

In York he was seen shouting into a megaphone in front of a banner containing the words “Refugees not welcome: Hitler was right.”

Davies denies membership of a proscribed organisation and the trial continues.

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