It seems that during WW2 and for the couple of decades after, the immediate associations in popular culture with Hitler and the Nazis in Allied countries were first of a tyrannical and oppressive regime bent on world domination and the hated enemy in the most deadliest ever war - which is of course how most people in Allied countries would have at first experienced them, especially those who fought or saw their friends and family killed or cities bombed - and, even after its scale became near-universally known, as the perpetrator of the Holocaust second. I think it's fair to say that when condemning the Nazis today, the first reason in people's minds is the Holocaust, certainly in the English speaking world, and I assume far more widely. This transition was probably gradual, and partly due to an expansion of understanding of what happened and a new generation that didn't have its own experience of the war to override others'... but how exactly did this transition take place?