My daily commute takes me through London’s Liverpool Street station. Most days I walk by a tiny touching statue, a bronze of two small children with a suitcase. A sign reads: “Für Das Kind”, meaning for the children. The statue commemorates the Kindertransport that rescued 10,000 child refugees and brought them by train to safety in Britain, escaping the persecution of Jews in Nazi Europe. Few of those children ever saw their families again. Most who could not leave were exterminated.

Last week, just yards away from the statue, appeared a poster that fills me with horror. A looming, dark, hook-nosed figure dominates the foreground. This man is an object of suspicion, watched apprehensively by a pretty, pale-skinned young woman. This man is instantly identifiable – at least to anyone who knows world war two history – as the caricature Jew of Nazi propaganda posters.

However inadvertently, the designers have used a horribly familiar antisemitic image. The impact goes far beyond these associations, serious as those are. A friend who was unaware of Nazi iconography revealingly said that she saw on the poster an “evil-looking dark-skinned man”. The image plays on people’s fears of “the other”, and creates anxiety about a suspicious “they” who may be hiding something, in the words of the poster.

Eternal Jew, 1937. ‘The propagandists of the Third Reich knew exactly what they were doing when they used such imagery.’ Photograph: Alamy

Who exactly are “they”? People speaking Polish on their mobiles, perhaps, refugees, or young women wearing the hijab, or men of colour: groups who, in recent weeks of heightened tensions, have suffered an upsurge in hate and racially motivated attacks.

The propagandists of the Third Reich knew exactly what they were doing when they used such imagery. They encouraged a majority of people to focus on and fear minority groups, making them the targets of suspicion and violence. This deliberate demonisation created conditions for some human beings to take away the rights – and in the end, the lives – of others.

It is one thing to be concerned about public safety, and it makes sense to urge passengers to be vigilant, to look out for activity that appears abnormal, like an unattended bag. What is wrong is to characterise people as being somehow not “normal”, not conforming to an image of so-called mainstream society.

This campaign, launched by rail minister Paul Maynard, was approved by the Department for Transport and the British Transport Police. What a failure of their Holocaust education and racism awareness, that no one who signed this off realised how shocking the posters are.

A Kindertransport statue in Liverpool Street station. Photograph: Susie Symes

Members of the public did though. As the campaign rolls out at major stations, many have tweeted the British Transport Police to set out their concerns. One person thought the poster was from a neo-Nazi group. Others objected that all the witnesses were white.

In times of an increased terrorist threat, people need to be looking out for each other. This is not achieved by a campaign that divides passengers one from another, and that makes many – migrants, minorities, Muslims, Jews, people of colour – actually feel more frightened because they are being implicitly identified as suspicious and risky.

Yesterday Lord Bilimoria, chairman of Cobra Beer, spoke out about the “appalling” racism and hate he has received following the June referendum. After 30 years of living in the UK, he has been told to “go home”. This shows how anti-immigrant sentiment and nationalism have created a powerful nativism, with inflammatory and dehumanising language being normalised. From the Third Reich to the former Yugoslavia, we should surely know the catastrophic consequences of scapegoating communities.

In response to criticisms, British Transport Police issued a statement saying that it is saddened people “may” have been upset by their posters and that they used “illustrations rather than photographs to avoid singling out any group or member of the community” with the intention “to show specific examples of what people should look out for”. Whatever the intention, these campaign posters have the effect of legitimising racism and xenophobia. We should not have to tolerate these hateful posters: take them down.