To preface this, I want to make clear that I fully believe that the German Holocaust of Jews and war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against others were criminal and ethically and morally reprehensible. I also believe that, even if not for the Holocaust/Shoah and other crimes against humanity, the Germans and their Axis allies were in the wrong and that the Allied Powers were fighting for the legally and ethically right cause of the European War of World War II (and other conflicts of the war, but that's another discussion). I fully believe that the Germans/Axis initiated and waged illegal wars of aggression in violation of international law - crimes against peace - and thus, with or without holocaust/crimes against humanity, their cause was unjustified.

However, something that I find peculiar is how the narrative of the WWII European War and the efforts of the Allies have shifted into a modern popular narrative about why their war was the quintessential righteous and "good war." It seems as though the modern narrative of the conflict in popular historiography is that the war needed to be fought in order to stop the Shoah/Holocaust and save the Jews from extermination. The Allies are portrayed as fighting to do just that.

But the thing is, at the time of the war, none of the Allied Powers - certainly not the main powers, the United States, the United Kingdom/British Commonwealth, France, and the U.S.S.R. - were fighting to stop the holocaust; ending the genocide was simply a result of Allied victory, and incidental to the overall conflict. Not only that, but the Germans themselves were not fighting to carry out the holocaust. The Germans first initiated war with their invasion of Poland in 1939, but this was done for the purpose of obtaining more territory for the purpose of lebensraum - depopulating and colonizing Slavic territories. The other Slavic territories the Germans invaded they did so for that same reason, and the non-Slavic ones they invaded because of the Allied wars against them. In fact, initially, the U.S.S.R., which became one of the main Allied Powers, was fighting as effectively an ally of the Germans and helping them conquer eastern territories, only joining the Allies after being invaded by the Germans. The primary objective of the Allies throughout the conflict was defending Allied sovereignty and forcing the Germans out of invaded and occupied Allied territories, and didn't even demand an unconditional German surrender and the occupation and reformation of Germany and destruction of the Nazi regime until 1943, well into the conflict, and largely as a means of neutralizing the threat posed by Germany to themselves post-war. By the time the Nazi "final solution" began in 1942, all of the major Allied Powers of the war had already entered the conflict, thus the genocide may have indirectly been a result of the Allied war efforts against the Nazi regime.

And after the Germans surrendered in 1945, the primary focus of the Allies in the occupation of Germany, including de-nazification, was in ensuring that Germany would no longer be a threat to Allied sovereignty. That was the basis of most of the Allied occupation reforms, including the amendments to the German constitution in 1949. At the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the primary purpose of the trial and its outcomes were also in eliminating the threat posed by German wartime political and military leaders, administering justice for the holocaust and other war crimes was secondary, and the primary focus of the trial was German initiation and waging of aggressive war.

But since the war, in popular historiography, the narrative has become that the conflict was the quintessential example of a "good war," not because the Allies defended nations, but because they stopped the holocaust. Books, movies, and other pop culture have soldiers saying "this is why we're here [to fight]" upon liberating a Nazi concentration or death camp. People point to the Holocaust specifically as being why the war needed to be fought. The Nazi regime is held up as a quintessential example of a tyrannical government and negative references and comparisons people make to people and policies they don't like to "Nazis" and "Hitler" are made invoking images of the holocaust, not the starting and waging of aggressive and illegal war.

So, how did this narrative come to be?