[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by Drolefille

Did you notice that Grindelwald was defeated in 1945? If bad things happen in the Muggle world when bad things happen in the wizarding world there are some definate parallels. You could almost take it to an extreme in saying that Hitler was no more than a pawn for the dark wizard...

JKR talked about the Hitler parallel in this 2000 interview.

An excerpt:

Interviewer: Some of the people that you satirize most in this book, the evil people, the Malfoys, they're very classist, they're racist against the Mudbloods. Is it fair to say that these are neo-Conservative or Thatcherite? (JK nods.) Is there a real political axe you're grinding there?

JK: I think in this book [GoF] too, you fully understand… With Voldemort, I didn't want to create this cardboard cutout of a baddie, where you put a black hat on him and you say 'Right, now you shoot at that guy because he's bad.'

Interviewer: Like the Dursleys are more of a cutout bad people?

JK: Yes and no. You will meet Dursleys, in Britain. You will. I've barely exaggerated them. Yeah, Voldemort. In the second book, Chamber of Secrets, in fact he's exactly what I've said before. He takes what he perceives to be a defect in himself, in other words the non-purity of his blood, and he projects it onto others. It's like Hitler and the Arian ideal, to which he did not conform at all, himself. And so Voldemort is doing this also. He takes his own inferiority, and turns it back on other people and attempts to exterminate in them what he hates in himself.

I do think she also said somewhere that conflict in the wizarding world can be reflected in conflict in the Muggle world.