Two Women Jailed For Posting Hitler Rants

Both a Scots Neo-Nazi mother and her daughter were imprisoned for posting extreme anti-Semitic, racist, and transphobic content on social media.

Shirley Craughwell described non-whites as ‘a different species’ and posted comments including ‘Hitler was trying to save us’ and ‘The need for a new holocaust is never more urgent than now’.

The 51-year-old used emojis connected to the Neo-Nazi movement, had links to publications including the Anarchist Cookbook and regularly used demeaning words.

She also encouraged and recorded a young child enacting Nazi salutations before publishing the troubling footage online.

Daughter Hannah – who used the online name ‘Hannah Hitler’ – labelled the Jewish race as ‘the devil’s children’ and circulated posters publicising a Neo-Nazi white power film in her local neighbourhood.

She was found to have shared racist and transphobic videos on her social media accounts.

The mother and daughter also linked the Israeli state to conspiracy theories, including the 9/11 terror attack and COVID, and denied that the Nazi Holocaust had taken place.

The duo pleaded guilty to hate crime offences heightened by racial and religious discrimination executed between 2021 and 2024 when they appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in November last year.

They returned to the dock for sentencing on Tuesday, where Sheriff Charles Walls was shown further video evidence of the racist and anti-Semitic material the pair had published online.

In sentencing Shirley Craughwell, Sheriff Walls said: ‘The level of hatred, racism and anti-semitism expressed by you is deeply disturbing.

‘You espoused conspiracy theories about white genocide and spoke repeatedly about your admiration of Adolf Hitler and other Nazis and called for another Holocaust.

‘However, your messages were not just offensive, they are violent and threatening in relation to people of the Jewish faith.’

The sheriff said involving the child in her offending was ‘a significant aggravation’.

Shirley Craughwell, of Galashiels, Selkirkshire, was condemned to a 20-month custodial term backdated to November 27.

The sheriff noted Hannah Craughwell had continued to ‘minimise’ her offending, had made ‘racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic and homophobic’ remarks online and circulated ‘highly inflammatory ‘ flyers in public.

The 27-year-old, who has two children, was incarcerated for 16 months.

Lawyer Simon Collins, for Shirley Craughwell, said his client was a grandmother and had ‘a long involvement in conspiracy theories leading her to act on them’.

He said she had experienced isolation during the COVID period and ‘expressed remorse and accepts responsibility’ for her offending.

Richard Soutar, for Hannah Craughwell, said she had ‘gone down a wormhole’ on the internet and had been ‘socially isolated’ and suffered from poor mental health at the time.

Previously, the court was told police received intelligence in May last year that both women had been posting ‘racist, anti-Semitic and threatening’ material on their social media pages.

Prosecutor David Gallagher said officers raided their homes, and Shirley Craughwell was found to have a Telegram account where she had posted thousands of extremist comments while in contact with others.

Mr Gallagher said the material showed Craughwell used emojis in the shape of the Nazi salute, along with the slang term 88 – online slang for Heil Hitler.

She made claims to be ‘a proud racist’ and published comments such as ‘we must unite as a race’.

Craughwell also operated a Facebook page under the alias ‘Goyim AH’ where she posted racist and anti-Semitic memes and web links.

She used the account to distribute material supporting the alt-right group Highland Division – a breakaway from the white nationalist organisation Patriotic Alternative (PA).

The page featured a post from PA’s James Costello, who was condemned to a five-year jail term for provoking racial hostility in 2023 but was released early on licence in December last year.

Police discovered Hannah Craughwell, of Gilmerton, Edinburgh, had an account on the US right-wing extremist chat site Gab where she used the online persona ‘Hannah Hitler’.

She regularly shared extreme right-wing content on the site.

The court was told racist and transphobic material was openly shared on her Facebook and Instagram pages, and she had distributed flyers in her local area publicising the Neo-Nazi propaganda film Europa – The Last Battle.

I do not condone what they were doing, but we have a right to free speech, well, I thought we did. However, what they did was a bit over the top, but on the other hand, perhaps it’s not when we have migrants roaming our streets and raping our women and children. But then, who am I, just another person, and I bet our government are loving having this control over us all!

That’s the trouble when the state determines what is free speech and what is not; everyone suffers the consequences. The law should be applied fairly and equally, but it’s not.

I’m sure everyone has an opinion, but then they don’t all publish it over social media. However, if Muslims are allowed to preach and do what they like, why shouldn’t the white British people be allowed to do the same, because at the moment, this is two-tier at its finest?

This pair were holocaust deniers – that’s fine, they are allowed to their view, but another holocaust, well, that is another thing altogether, and that is what they should have been jailed for, not their beliefs, but to incite another holocaust makes them the most mindless, most unattractive morons that have been scraped from the lower end of the intellectual food chain.