Fury after Melbourne neo-Nazis celebrate Hitler’s birthday at The Hof Downtown

Melbourne neo-Nazis openly celebrated Hitler’s birthday with a swastika cake after duping a beer hall into hosting the offensive gathering.

Tom Sewell, holds a photo of Adolf Hitler at The Hof Downtown Bavarian beer hall in the Docklands, while junior members of his racist group perform Nazi salutes.

A group of neo-Nazis duped a Melbourne beer hall into hosting a celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday in the latest demonstration of just how brazen far-right wing groups in Australia have become.

Photos, circulated on a far-right online chat group, show notorious racist figure Tom Sewell holding a portrait of Hitler at the head of the table at Bavarian beer hall The Hof Downtown in the Docklands on the evening of April 20.

His group made a large booking at the venue under a false name and repeatedly made Nazi salutes while drinking beer and eating cake.

They also posted a series of photos online of celebrations elsewhere, which included a cake that had been decorated with a swastika drawn in coloured icing.

The group, which is being closely monitored by national security agencies, blurred all of its members’ faces other than Sewell’s before posting the photo online.

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The brazen, public nature of the gathering has prompted renewed calls for the rag-tag white supremacist groups operating in Australia to be designated as terrorist organisations.

Anti Defamation Commission chairman Dr Dvir Abramovich said pictures neo-Nazis gathering in broad daylight in Melbourne should send chills down the spine of every Victorian.

“Looking at those images one could think they were taken at a tavern in Nazi Germany of the 1930s, not in Melbourne 2022,” Dr Abramovich said.

“These Hitler worshippers, who fantasise about a Fourth Reich and an Auschwitz in Melbourne are a growing threat to our safety, and if we don’t act, it will cost lives.

“No one can sleep easy knowing that such homegrown extremists are amongst us and are trying to recruit young, disaffected young men to their twisted cause.”

Anti-defamation commission chairman Dr Dvir Abramovich has called for neo-Nazi organisations to be declared terrorist organisation. Picture: Tony Gough

Dr Abramovich warned that hardcore bigots had gone on to commit massacres overseas, including in Christchurch and the United States.

He said he looked forward to the Victorian government passing laws this year to outlaw the display of the swastika, and repeated his call for the federal government to designate white supremacist groups as terrorist organisations.

Such a move would make members liable to arrest, preventive detention and restrictions on their day-to-day activities.

The Hof Group managing director Marcel Moodley said restaurant management rang Victoria Police as soon as they became aware who the group were, after spotting a picture of Hitler the group had brought to the restaurant.

Blair Cottrell and Tom Sewell, leaders of the United Patriots Front. Picture: Kylie Else

Mr Moodley said the group paid their bill and were about to leave before management could confront them.

Mr Moodley, from South Africa, said he took the incident “personally”.

“I am non-white individual originally from South Africa and was subjected to the atrocities of the apartheid system,” he said.

The company will donate the Nazi group’s table to a local charity as a gesture condemning their racist views.

“We are also deeply horrified and saddened that this exists in modern day in a beautiful free country we all get to call home,” Mr Moodley said.

“Acts of this nature will not be tolerated.”