Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah, The systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Fueled by antisemitism, the Nazi persecution of Jews began soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 with a boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. Under the Nürnberg Laws (1935), Jews lost their German citizenship. About 7,500 Jewish businesses were gutted, more than 1,000 synagogues burned or damaged, and at least 91 Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and thereafter Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps or forced into ghettos. German victories early in World War II (1939–45) brought most European Jews under the control of the Nazis and their satellites. As German armies moved into Poland, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union, special mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, rounded up and killed Jews as well as Romani, communists, political leaders, and intellectuals. Additional groups targeted by the Nazis included gay men, the mentally and physically disabled, and a wide range of other people considered enemies of the German state. At the Wannsee Conference (1942), a “final solution” was formulated for the elimination of Europe’s Jewish population, and thereafter Jews from across Nazi-occupied Europe were systematically evacuated to concentration and extermination camps, where they were either killed or forced into slave labor. Underground resistance movements arose in several countries, and Jewish rebellions, notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), took place against overwhelming odds. Individuals, such as Raoul Wallenberg, saved thousands by their efforts; whether the Allied governments and the Vatican could have done more to aid Jews has long been a matter of controversy.