A connection that I believe was partially intentional is the number system in The Giver. Throughout the book, people are not given names for the first year of their lives, and even after they aren't given a surname, instead they are assigned a number. The numbers are the order the children were born, and they are used as identifiers. In the Holocaust, Jewish people, and other minorities placed in concentration camps, were stripped of their identities, and given numbers in place of their names. These numbers were tattooed on their forearms, treating them more like animals than human. While the numbers were used in very different ways, there are notable similarities, like how it dehumanizes them, and conforms everyone to "sameness".

Another less obvious similarity is the way twins are treated in The Giver and the Holocaust. In The Giver, when twins are born, they are raised for the first year of their lives, then the "stronger" twin (the heavier twin, the one who sleeps more soundly, etc), and the other is released to elsewhere (killed). During WWII, Josef Mengele was a "doctor" who practiced brutal human experiments. He searched for twins so that he could study and experiment on them at Auschwitz concentration camp because he was interested in the genetics of twins. Records state that he experimented on at least 732 pairs of twins.

It is implied and theorized that this is based on what a future could have looked like if Hitler had won WWII, and all people were part of his so called "master race". The book talks about the horrors and memories of war and the history that was hidden from the public, which connects heavily to the Holocaust.

(From the dictionary)

Although, you didn't have to be Jewish yourself to be affected. Anyone with two Jewish grandparents or more, or was married to a Jewish person, was classified as Jewish.

Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria.

Cause of death: Self inflicted gunshot to the head.