A Holocaust survivor said he was stunned and greatly troubled when he saw Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump and his followers making a "Heil Hitler" salute last Saturday during a rally in Orlando, Florida.

"As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, to see an audience of thousands of people raising their hands in what looks like the 'Heil Hitler' salute is about as offensive, obnoxious and disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America," said Abraham Foxman, the former director of the Anti-Defamation League, the Times of Israel and Raw Story reported.

"It is a fascist gesture," Foxman said. "He [Trump] is smart enough — he always tells us how smart he is — to know the images that this evokes. Instead of asking his audience to pledge allegiance to the United States of America, which in itself would be a little bizarre, he's asking them to swear allegiance to him."

During the rally, Trump asked his supporters to raise their right hands in salute and promise to vote for him in the Florida primary election.

Foxman—who was born in Poland in 1940 and was saved from the Nazis by his Catholic nanny—said Trump is playing a dangerous game, adding that the symbolism of his gesture was obvious and troubling.

The Nazi Party adopted the stiff-armed salute to signal obedience to Hitler. It's still used today by right-wing extremists, according to Raw Story.

"We've seen this sort of thing at rallies of neo-Nazis. We've seen it at rallies of white supremacists. But to see it at a rally for a legitimate candidate for the presidency of the United States is outrageous," Foxman said.

During that event, Trump also warned his supporters who took the pledge that "bad things" would happen to them if they broke their sworn pledge to vote for him. Foxman said he was particularly disturbed by that statement.

"This is so over the top for a man who really doesn't come out of the underground," Foxman said. "He is a man of the world. Even though he proclaims he doesn't know who David Duke was, or the other white supremacists, we know very well that he knows. So he's playing to an image."

Foxman warned that Trump might have been emboldened to show his real outrageous character, believing that this is what endears him to people as shown by the massive support extended him by the public.

"I think he was intoxicated with all the things that he's already got away with, and it led him to this," Foxman said. "This is the summit of his own intoxication with what he perceives as his leadership quality."

Trump's underlying message of violence is "increasingly appealing" to his supporters and threatens to "break all the taboos of civil behavior," Foxman said.

"When he said, 'I can walk down the street on Fifth Avenue and kill somebody and my supporters will not desert me,' he knows exactly what buttons he's pushing," Foxman said. "Or when that guy interrupted his speech. People in that situation may think internally, 'Oh, I want to punch him in the mouth.' But you don't say it, you don't say it, because it's not civilised. But he said it and it was applauded."

Foxman said Saturday's rally was an unprecedented moment in American political history.

"You can find some authoritarian, semi-fascist tinges in Southern politics during the segregationist era," he said. "But there's never been anything like this, and nothing on this scale."

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