Holocaust (Sho'ah in Hebrew) is the name given to the twelve-year period in which the Nazis implemented their schemes to exterminate European Jewry. Beginning in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, millions of Jews were subjected to humiliation, discrimination, slave labor, torture and death. The Nazis and their collaborators in other countries hunted down every Jew - from the prominent professional to the lowly laborer - in their relentless pursuit of the ultimate "solution" to the "Jewish question".