Australian neo-Nazis photographed at a May 2016 rally, in an image captured by an anti-fascist website. Photo: tsgtf.com.au.

Members of a violent neo-Nazi group in Australia shocked the Jewish community in Melbourne this week when they placed a sticker bearing a swastika at the entrance to an elderly care residence that is home to several Holocaust survivors.

The offending images were discovered by Sam Seigel, who was visiting his parents, both aged 94, at the Emmy Monash Aged Care facility in southeast Melbourne.

The local Herald Sun newspaper quoted Seigel saying, “I just saw it stuck to the front gates.”

“I just stood there and looked — it knocked me about,” Seigel said. He added that those residents who survived the Holocaust would be “horrified” at being confronted with the symbol of the Nazi regime.

The chairman of the Australian Jewish community’s Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) denounced the sticker — placed by the neo-Nazi group Antipodean Resistance — as “cowardly and evil.”

“We are appalled by this latest attack, made all the more despicable as there are Holocaust survivors living in this aged-care home who lost family relatives and suffered under Hitler’s regime,” the ADC’s Dvir Abramovich said.

Antipodean Resistance carried out a similar stunt in August 17, on that occasion targeting a Melbourne Jewish school.

An April 2018 study of Antipodean Resistance by a researcher with the Executive Council for Australian Jewry stated that the group “promotes and incites hatred and violence, as seen through some of its anti-Jewish and anti-homosexual posters, with graphic images of shooting Jews and homosexuals in the head. One poster called to ‘Legalize the execution of Jews.'”

“In addition, Antipodean Resistance has connections to groups overseas who have committed terrorist acts and/or are proscribed terrorist organizations,” researcher Julie Nathan wrote. “The group also espouses support for literature that calls for guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Antipodean Resistance is a small but highly active group.”

The group launched in late 2016, when two young neo-Nazis in Melbourne, using the online handles “Eagle’s Nest” and “Xav,” made contact through the now-defunct far-right internet platform “Iron March,” according to another study of the Antipodean Resistance’s origins.

“[T]he group has publicly stated that it models itself upon relevant groups overseas: National Action (NA) in the UK and the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) in Scandinavia in particular,” the study observed, adding that law enforcement authorities in Europe had taken decisive action against both of these neo-Nazi groups.

Antipodean Resistance is believed to have grown from its original Melbourne base to about 300 members in different Australian towns and cities.