Vietnam veteran and former governor-general Sir Peter Cosgrove says “Hitler would be proud” watching Australians boycott Jewish-owned businesses, harass community members and bring violence to city and suburban streets.

The former chief of Australia’s Defence Forces condemned activists around the country weaponising pro-Palestinian protests to spread anti-Semitism.

“Hitler would be proud,” Sir Peter said. “Watching what’s happening today in Australia, Hitler would be giving a thumbs-up to those radical elements who are trying to breach this great pillar of Australia’s national character.”

Sir Peter made the comments in a new Sky News documentary, hosted by former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, urging Aussies to “reject the stigmatisation of any part of our community”.

The distinguished army officer is backed by former prime minister Julia Gillard who warns “the Holocaust teaches us where anti-Semitism leads if it’s not confronted”.

“It didn’t go from situation normal to gas chambers and Auschwitz in the blink of an eye,” she said.

And former defence boss Dennis Richardson who said Australia is “seeing echoes” of the “pure evil” that spread across Europe in the 1930s as Jewish businesses are boycotted and violent demonstrations arrive on Jewish doorsteps.

Mr Richardson also labelled the popular chant “From the River to the Sea” a “very violent statement” with no place in Australia – a sentiment Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who also features, agreed with.

The documentary follows Hamas’s devastating terrorist attack which left 1200 Israelis dead in southern Israel on October 7 and the growing hostility towards Jewish people around the world in the aftermath of Israel’s subsequent military actions against Hamas.

That hostility that led to hundreds of Jewish artists, performers, writers and business owners being targeted and threatened, forcing some Jewish families living in Melbourne to pack up their lives and move.

And it has led proud Australian Holocaust survivors to question their safety in the sanctuary that gave them a second chance at life.

Mimi Wise, thought she had found a lasting “paradise” when she landed on Australian shores in 1947 after surviving Nazi-occupied France.

Today – 77 years later – she says the threat has tracked her down again – this time robbing her children and grandchildren of their sense of security.

“The age of innocence has been shattered, shattered for all of us, particularly for the young children in the community,” she said.

“I’m very distressed for my children and grandchildren in particular who’ve never faced that and don’t know it.”

Prominent Victorian community leader Nina Bassat, who survived a Polish ghetto as a child before going into hiding as the Nazis hunted down Jews across Europe, slammed a lack of action by authorities in ­responding to increasingly violent pro-Palestinian protests.

“The unruly mob has been allowed to rule,” she said.

“We’re revisiting the 1930s …. What is new and what is strange is that we’re seeing it in Australia, and that is what is so very painful.”

For NSW survivor Egon Sonnenschein, hearing the anti-Israel speeches at protests has forced him to reflect on the atrocities he experienced as a child kicked out of school in Yugoslavia and forced to flee to Croatia, where he and his family lived in constant terror under the brutal rule of them fascist Ustashi that saw victims – many Jews – impaled, burned alive and drowned.

“At the moment, it is terrible speeches, vitriolic speeches, against the Jews,” he said.

“If they speak too much about it, people will start to believe in it, and this must be stopped at all costs.”