Trump 'obviously admired Hitler,' says Anne Frank's stepsister, referring to claims he studied his speeches

• The Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss has said Donald Trump "obviously admired Hitler."
• Trump's former wife Ivana reportedly once said Trump kept a book of Hitler's speeches near his bed.
• "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them," Trump said then.

The 91-year-old stepsister of Anne Frank said in a new interview that former President Donald Trump "obviously admired Hitler," referring to a claim by Trump's first wife that he kept copies of the Nazi leader's speeches at home.

Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor who cofounded The Anne Frank Trust UK, made the comment to The Daily Beast, also saying the former president was "a racist."

"There was a noticeable uptick in anti-Semitic hate crimes during the Trump administration," she said. "And there was a president in Trump who described neo-Nazis chanting 'Jews will not replace us' as 'very fine people.'"

She went on to say: "Trump wasn't just against the Jews. He was against the Mexicans, and many others. He was a racist. Full-stop, he was a racist.

"I've compared him to Hitler. I even heard that he studied Hitler's speeches and things like that, so he obviously admired Hitler and just copied him with his anti-Semitism."

Schloss met Frank in the Netherlands after fleeing Vienna. Her mother married Frank's father, Otto, after the war.

There is no evidence of Trump expressing admiration for Hitler. Schloss' comment about Trump studying Hitler's speeches appears to refer to comments made by Trump's first wife, Ivana, in a 1990 Vanity Fair interview.

She reportedly told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that Trump kept a book of Hitler's speeches in a cabinet near his bed.

Trump denied, however, that he had ever read the speeches. "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them," he told a reporter.

The Anti-Defamation League reported last year that Jews in the US in 2019 suffered the most anti-Semitic incidents in the watchdog's 40-year history tracking them, per Reuters.

The president was repeatedly criticized during his presidency for not doing more to condemn far-right violence in the US. In one of the most notorious episodes of his presidency, he blamed "many sides" for neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and said there were "very fine people" on "both sides."

Toward the end of his term, he refused to explicitly condemn the far-right Proud Boys during a 2020 presidential debate and instead told the group to "stand back and stand by."

Trump subsequently claimed that his remarks had been embellished by opponents.

Insider contacted Trump's office for comment.