Anne Frank’s step-sister has said Donald Trump is “acting like another Hitler by inciting racism”.
Eva Schloss - whose mother married the father of the German born diarist who became one of the most well known Jewish victims of the Nazi regime - spoke out about the would-be Republican presidential candidate in an interview to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
“If Donald Trump became the next president of the US it would be a complete disaster," Ms Schloss told Newsweek,
Criticising the current British, American and Canadian refugee policies, Ms Schloss said: "Fewer people would have died in the Holocaust if the world had accepted more Jewish refugees."
"> ">It is “even harder for today’s Syrian refugees," Ms Schloss said, because they have “a very different culture”.
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As "assimilated" European Jews, Schloss’ family was still “treated as if we had come from the moon” when they arrived in the Netherlands in 1938, she said.
“I was shocked that I wasn’t accepted like an ordinary person," she said.
Her family fled Austria in 1938 after it was annexed by Nazi Germany, settling in Amsterdam where they knew the Franks.
Both families went into hiding in 1942, but were betrayed and taken to concentration camps two years later. While Ms Schloss was liberated from Auschwitz in 1945, Anne Frank died of typhoid weeks before her camp, Bergen-Belsen, was reached by Allied troops.
Anne Frank’s father, Otto, married Ms Schloss’ mother, Fritzi, after the war.
Ms Schloss praised modern Germany’s acceptance of over a million refugees, and its government’s organised response.
“The country has not gone under”, she said.
Anne Frank and her family would have lived, Ms Schloss suggested, had the US accepted Otto Frank’s visa applications in 1940.
“He tried everything to save his family from the Holocaust…but his request was rejected," she said.
"America didn’t want to take any more refugees.
“The situation today is worse than it was under Hitler because at that time all the Allies - the US, Russia and Britain - worked together to combat the terrible threat of Nazism. If we don't work together, the world will never be able to resolve the threats it faces today.”
'Don't Stand By' is the theme of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day, but "more people than ever are being bystanders", said Ms Schloss.
“We haven't really learnt anything—I’m depressed by the current situation.”
She is not the first to compare Donald Trump to Hitler.
Following the presidential nominee's December call for a ban on Muslims entering the US, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter accused Mr Trump of taking “a page from the play book of Hitler", saying his comments "engender a level of fear mongering that we have not seen literally since the 1930s and 1940s".
Former New Jersey Republican Governor Christine Todd Whitman also told CNN that Mr Trump's remarks were “the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward."
"You have people who were scared the economy was bad - they want someone to blame," she said.
The Philadelphia Daily News responded to Mr Trump's call for a ban with a cover that punned on Führer, the German word for 'leader' and Hitler's title.
Remind you of someone? Trump wants to ban Muslims from entering U.S. @StuBykofsky @joeberkery @PhillyDailyNews Tues. pic.twitter.com/lVc9jjTm2S
— David Lee Preston (@DavidLeePreston) December 8, 2015
In November, fellow presidential nominee Jeb Bush’s advisor Max Boot also called Mr Trump "a fascist" on Twitter.
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