Hebrew Shoʾah
Systematic state-sponsored killing of Jewish men, women, and children and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Nazis made no secret of their anti-Semitism before coming to power in 1933.
Once they gained control of the government, they adopted increasingly barbaric methods against the Jews, whom they considered subhuman, in the expanding territories under German rule. The Holocaust climaxed in the "final solution," the attempted extermination of European Jewry. Nürnberg Laws (1935), Jews lost their citizenship. Almost every synagogue in Germany was destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and thereafter Jews were imprisoned in concentration camp s or forced into ghettos. German victories in the early years of World War II (1939–45) brought most of European Jewry under the control of the Nazis and their satellites. As German armies moved eastward into Poland, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union, special mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen , rounded up and killed Jews, Roma (Gypsies), communists, political leaders, and intellectuals. Other groups targeted by the Nazis included homosexuals, the mentally retarded, physically disabled, and emotionally disturbed. After the Wannsee Conference (1942), Jews from all over occupied Europe were systematically evacuated to concentration and extermination camps, where they were either killed or forced into slave labour. Underground resistance movements were active in several countries, and Jewish risings took place against overwhelming odds in the ghettos of Poland (see Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ). Individuals such as {{link=Wallenberg, Raoul">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. By the end of the war, an estimated six million Jews and millions of others had been killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.