Neo-Nazis are getting younger and more violent in the UK as teenagers are drawn into “disturbing” movements, a report has warned.

Research by counterextremism group Hope Not Hate found that children as young as 13 were becoming involved in a new wave of organisations that are gathering support online.

“The trend towards younger, more violent Nazis is a real concern and needs to be monitored closely,” researchers said.

“The threat of far-right terrorism comes from both organised groups, like National Action, but increasingly from lone actors who get radicalised on the internet.”

Researcher Duncan Cahill said young teenagers were among those involved in emerging neo-Nazi networks, but have no clear aim. 

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“It’s a death cult,” he told The Independent. “They want to be noticed, to be feared, to be respected. A lot of them will grow out of it but some of them won’t.”

Security services say the dominant terror threat to the UK comes from Isis and other Islamist groups, but have warned of the growing risk posed by the far right following the Finsbury Park attack and murder of Jo Cox.

Neo-Nazi group National Action was founded by two students in 2013 and became notorious for targeting universities with racist propaganda, as it continued to target teenagers and young men.

The State of Hate report said the government’s 2016 ban caused members to fracture into a series of spin-off groups continuing the same ideology.

Two – Scottish Dawn and NS131 – have been banned and The Independent understands that security officials are discussing whether to proscribe other alleged factions.

But for now, neo-Nazi groups including the System Resistance Network, Sonnenkrieg Division and Order of Nine Angles continue to operate across England and Wales.

Hope Not Hate said the groups were potentially “even more hardline” than National Action, with some drawing on Satanic influences and the idea of “white jihad”.

Mr Cahill said members were “misogynistic and deeply obsessed with violence”, while also hating Jews and other races.

“They have picked up where National Action left off,” he added. “By the time it finished it was a death cult, it was into paedophilia, it was into Satanism and the idea of white jihad and martyrdom … people are assuming a race war is inevitable.

“We’re seeing more dangerous, more cult-like, end of days behaviour.”

Mr Cahill said the decline of far-right political parties the National Front and British National Party had caused older neo-Nazis to be replaced by younger, more internet savvy extremists. 

“For the new generation of Nazis, Hitler isn’t enough,” he added. “The ideology is now harder, darker and more committed than ever before because they just don’t see a way out of race war. 

“They are not recruiting people like they used to, football hooligan types, they’re recruiting people attracted to the secrecy of the dark web and bedroom fantasies.

“It’s really beginning to mirror what we saw when a lot of kids were going off to Syria.”

Hope Not Hate estimates that up to 60 people are active in neo-Nazi networks inspired by National Action, but their use of encryption and dark web forums makes the true number hard to gauge.

Former members of National Action include a man who plotted to murder a Labour MP, another who tried to behead an Asian man in Tesco, a teenager who tried to make a pipe bomb and an extremist who planned a massacre at an LGBT+ pride event.

The group became the first far-right organisation to be banned in the UK in 2016, after praising the murder of Labour MP Ms Cox and tweeting: “Only 649 MPs to go”.

Membership is a criminal offence, seeing a couple who gave their baby the middle name “Adolf” in Hitler’s honour jailed last year.

The proportion of far-right terror suspects has been rising in the UK, and the number of people referred to the Prevent programme over suspected far-right extremism has rocketed by 36 per cent in a year.

In the year to September, 40 per cent of terror suspects arrested were white, 33 per cent were Asian, 12 per cent were black and 14 per cent were recorded as other.

Police say 14 Islamist terror plots and four from far-right extremists have been foiled since the Westminster attack in March 2017.