Undercover inside a secret Hitler-worshipping fight club

Our special undercover investigation into a secret Adelaide fight club has revealed how a group of lonely white working class men have fallen under the influence of an American terror cell.

• Neo-nazi group reveals plan in former cult’s HQ

It’s a world of secret fight clubs, the creation of pure “Aryan” families and anti-Semitic threats of rape and violence. Sounds like a dystopian nightmare – but it’s happening right here in Adelaide.

This is a story about disenfranchised young men meeting under the guise of a fitness group, led by political extremists who think society is about to collapse because this was prophesied by Hindu religious texts and Adolf Hitler.

It’s also about two men I got to know named Roy (not his real name) and Cam. First on a phone call when they “screened me” to join the National Socialist Network, one of Australia’s biggest far-right political groups. During the call they asked me about my racial background and what I thought of Jews and gay people.

They did not know I was a journalist, that I thought their views were absurd, and that I am gay.

During the chat, Cam chimes in to say: “I don’t mind gay people”. Then silence. Quickly followed by: “Only joking – it’s absolutely f---ing disgusting”.

I was told I needed to read Mein Kampf – a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler – and join their weekly boxing training every week when I arrived from interstate to Adelaide the following week.

I would later meet Roy at Playford Tavern in Davoren Park, 40km from the Adelaide CBD. He was 25, fit and friendly with eyes downcast, shy.

He said white people were at risk of dying out because of covert Jewish control of the world.

He said he wanted all non-Europeans forcibly migrated from Australia – including the indigenous, who he said actually come from India.

He showed me the secret handshake, Roman, hands on each other’s forearms and said welcome to the brotherhood.

Jo Gapper Activity Park in Hillbank was one of the northern suburbs locations used by the Adelaide neo-Nazi group for its Sunday fight club.

THE FIRST SESSION

My first active club session was at a Pooraka park – it’s a carbon copy of most of the other parks in the northern suburbs; flat, black asphalt tennis court, dry brown grass, not a soul to be seen except for the six boys in black with red sunburnt faces, shirtless, letting out ferocious groans as they shadow box into the air.

There I met Cam, a heavy-set, goofy guy also in his mid-20s. He was a plumber, but was then unemployed. Clumsy on his feet, unable to skip, uncoordinated, but also self-deprecating, welcoming and funny.

Over time, I noticed there was no discussion of policies, and no meetings outside of boxing.

Directions from the national leader, Victorian-based former army officer Thomas Sewell – who was convicted of violent affray in 2023 – were handed down “as orders”.

Outside of juvenile name-calling, conversations between all members seemed strained and uncomfortable.

Roy began picking me up from my house. He always struggled to hold a conversation, so I asked: what made you join the Nazis?

“The state of (the) world, no housing, gangs, rape, Indians everywhere taking over,” he said.

“But also what happened to Cam. Getting put in prison like that. It was just so unfair.”

Cameron Brodie-Hall. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ben Clark

SA’S TERRORISM LINKS

This led me to Googling about which neo-Nazis were jailed in my new state South Australia.

It led me to discover that Cam was in fact Cameron Brodie-Hall, who was remanded in jail charged with one count of possessing a document or record of information for terrorist acts and one count of possessing extremist material after a series of raids in 2021.

Brodie-Hall was ultimately found not guilty.

Brodie-Hall, along with his roommates, Trevor Pay and Duncan Roger Cromb, were all found to be “senior members” of Adelaide’s neo-Nazi movement.

They were arrested after a police raid on their homes in Dudley Park,in Adelaide’s inner northwestern suburbs,found a book in the house’s Nazi flag draped communal bookshelf.

The book was an instructional manual on how to kill people and destroy infrastructure by David Myatt, a neo-Nazi turned Islamic militant who praised bin Laden and al-Qaeda, turned out to be owned by Cromb and another by Pay – who also owned a copy of a book by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

Pay, who was also found to have notes on the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US and the Snowtown murders in South Australia, and Cromb – a lapsed Catholic friar who was the then chair of the group – were both found guilty of possessing documents and records of information for terrorist acts.

Brodie-Hall was found not guilty because the books were not his.

He spent 13 months on remand in prison and another 12 months on home detention, and pledged in court documents that he had an explicit nonviolence stance – wanting “peaceful community building” for the purpose of preserving white Australia.

Conversations through text messaging with members.

Text messages tendered by the prosecution showed that Brodie-Hall described the Christchurch massacre killer Brenton Tarrant as a “Freedom Fighter”.

It was also found he had googled Myatt’s “Acasual Realm” – the idea that white supremacists could find a way to access a “world that does not conform to the world of physics”, meaning sorcery and black magic.

Cromb and Pay appear no longer to be affiliated with the group in any way.

Cromb renounced his NSN views in a court hearing last year.

The fight club sessions were held at various public parks in Adelaide’s northern suburbs.

WHAT THEY BELIEVE

I made an effort to engage more in the group and get closer to Brodie-Hall to find out the true beliefs of NSN.

I went to boxing classes on 40 degree days. Worked out at the gym all week to make it through the session. I went to their only other event – a barbecue of 30 SA members where they drank unpasteurised milk, played Waltzing Matilda on mouth harmonicas and discussed “disgusting faggot parades” and Sudanese men raping white women.

I told Brodie-Hall I had read a Mein Kampf. He was impressed and told me to read Joseph Goebbels.

I mentioned I had been reading about Savirti Devi, the Greek-Italian woman who in 1932 at the age of 27 converted to Hinduism, changed her name and became a Nazi spy.

“I’m a big fan of hers,” Brodie-Hall told me.

“I think we are in the last stages of what could be described as the Dark Age – the Kuli Yuga.”

The end of the Dark Age, he said, would be followed by a Golden Age of white supremacy.

“The vedas talk about a chosen people called Kalki coming down to destroy the sinners and save the world,” to usher in the Golden Age he said.

He said that event was prophesied by Hitler in his last words to his valet.

“Hitler” he said “is of divine providence or a prophet, whether he realised or not”.

After this conversation I later tracked down his school friends from the multicultural Woodville High School in Adelaide’s north. They said while he excelled in some areas of school, he was relentlessly bullied for his deficiencies in others areas; particularly his complete lack of physical co-ordination.

He talked extensively and positively about the Nazis and Hitler from at least the age of 12.

PATTERN EMERGES

Cromb, the former SA chair who was convicted, would eventually ask for his SA District Court parole conditions to be relaxed midway through last year. The court heard that Cromb struggled with sexual intimacy and had few friends and just one ever girlfriend when at age 36 he came across NSN leader Thomas Sewell online and a friendship began.

He said he had met indigenous people in prison who changed his views. He said he’d found his way in the community now – through linedancing, community gardening and a book club at his local library.

I looked at Trevor Pay’s judgment and I saw a pattern. Pay was also struggling with friendships and had been turned down from the military because of his autism spectrum disorder.

Carisbrooke Park, Salisbury Park, training ground for Neo Nazis Picture: No Byline

SECRET CHAT NAME

I discover Brodie-Hall’s name used on the messaging chat is “Zyklon”, a reference to the gas used in Nazi extermination camps which took about 20 minutes to kill millions in locked windowless rooms.

Yet at the same time, when I spoke again to a teacher from his former school: “Well to be honest … I don’t think he would hurt a fly”.

Meanwhile, Roy had told me at a fight club session, face and nose covered in blood, his girlfriend had a baby. He’d previously told me when he met his girlfriend, if she did not agree with his Nazi-views he would end the relationship, but I wondered if being a new father might soften his views.

I sent him a message later asking if he supported Nazi Germany’s campaign of sterilising “weak” German citizens.

Many of those were disabled German children, including autistic children, forcibly removed from their parents and later killed in their thousands.

In a millisecond, he replied: “Hell yes. Inter-racial couples and people who are like really mental”.

A bit later I asked Brodie-Hall what the end of the Kali Yuga, the start of the Golden Age, all meant for an NSN member.

“Get fit, become the best fighters, make as many babies as we can, create our own miniature national socialist state. It’s our mission”.

“The 14 words are our mission statement,” he said, “88 is our battle cry”.

It turns out 88 is a white supremacist numerical code for Heil Hitler.

And the 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”.

Far right activist Thomas Sewell is seen giving a nazi salute. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

I quickly discovered it had come from David Lane, an American convicted domestic terrorist who founded an organisation called The Order.

In 1984, the Order went on a spree of bloody violence, bomb detonations, robberies and murders with the goal of funding an armed militia to overthrow the United States Government and create a “white’s only” state.

Lane, who died in prison 2007, long after The Order’s co-founded had died in a shootout with the FBI, believed he was the anti-Christ prophecised in the bible.

It took me nearly five months of being involved in the group – focused almost entirely on fitness with no political activity – before Brodie-Hall described the breadth of his views.

When it comes to NSN, Sewell has previously been recorded saying he wants to attract members from mainstream society under the guise of a men’s fitness club – people he describes as “normies”.

“It doesn’t matter how extreme or how radical we are inside our own circles, we need to maintain this really good public presence,” he said.

THE LINE IN THE SAND

My time on their messaging chat showed there are NSN groups all over Australia, with around 200 active members.

Brodie-Hall’s judgement said that the South Australia NSN membership was no more than 12 in 2021. Today it looks like there are about 30.

Through these groups one member said he had raised $1.2m to buy a 103-acre sprawling property to start a “white’s only” commune where women would be encouraged to “have as many babies of possible”.

It’s a quiet, eerie Fleurieu Peninsula countrylocation with winding roads, crisp air and dramatic, jagged hills – which the member said would be a “place to watch society collapse”.

I thought of what Sewell recently said on his podcast.

“You know, let’s do this peacefully – but touch f---ing children, touch our kids, it’s over.

“We want a white Australia for our children so they have a home to live in the future. So that’s it. That’s the line in the sand.”

Originally published as Undercover inside a secret Hitler-worshipping fight club