A 92-year-old Kindertransport survivor has issued an urgent call to put a stop to the politics of division before it’s too late, warning that the world has “learnt nothing” from the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany.

Speaking ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, Austrian-born Harry Bibring, who arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939, said he was deeply “concerned” about the state of the world and feared for the future of his great-grandsons.

The lecturer and former engineer, whose mother was killed in a Nazi camp in Poland in 1942, said it was imperative citizens around the world reject “differentiation and discrimination” and heed warnings from the past.

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“Lessons have not been learnt in the 20th century. As far as the 21st century goes, we seem to not only have not learnt the lesson but are on track to copy it,” he told The Independent.

“We need to get people to take lessons from this disaster – the greatest crime committed in the history of mankind – before something like this happens again.”

Speaking about Donald Trump’s shock victory in the 2016 US election, he said: “I think it’s very important that he doesn’t get a second term.

“We have a leader of the greatest country in the world who wants to differentiate and have prejudice, which should not be tolerated. It’s up to people in the US to remove him, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Mr Bibring’s warning comes as new figures reveal over a quarter (27 per cent) of UK adults have personally witnessed one or more incidents of hate speech in the last year, and 12 per cent have witnessed more than five incidents.

Research commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and conducted by YouGov found 41 per cent of those who witnessed incidents said they were racially-motivated.

Over half of the adults surveyed (59 per cent) witnessed hate speech on social media, 41 per cent in the street, 23 per cent on public transport and just under a quarter (24 per cent) in a pub or shop.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

When asked to share what they witnessed, many reported seeing anti-immigrant or anti-refugee hate speech, racist abuse or anti-Muslim comments.

Chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Olivia Marks-Woldman said the findings were “shocking”.

She said: “We know the repeated use of words normalises dangerous language and allows hatred to take root, which can ultimately lead to persecution.

“Today is about remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, but also about finding ways to make sure they can never happen again. Recognising the power our words have is an important first step.”

The sentiment was echoed by Mr Bibring, who works with the Holocaust Educational Trust. He asks his students to take an oath never to engage in any form of discrimination of people who are different from them – and commit to reporting instances of discrimination by others.

“You may notice I haven’t used the word race, because in my book there’s only one race on this planet, the human race, that is all we have,” he said.

“I say to my students, ‘right before you go, you thought this was all free but I’m afraid I do need payment now. I want you to promise me, never engage in any form of discrimination of people who are different from you and if you see it happening somewhere else, I want you to report it to the nearest authority’.”