The ordeal suffered by the Jews in Nazi Europe from 1933 to 1945. Conventionally it is divided into two periods, before and after 1941. In the first period various anti-Semitic measures were taken in Germany, and later Austria. In Germany, after the Nuremberg Laws (1935) Jews lost citizenship rights, the right to hold public office, practise professions, inter-marry with Germans, or use public education. Their property and businesses were registered and sometimes sequestrated. Continual acts of violence were perpetrated against them, and official propaganda encouraged Germans to hate and fear them. As intended, the result was mass emigration, halving the half-million German and Austrian Jewish population by the start of World War II. The second phase, which occurred during World War II from 1941, spread to Nazi-occupied Europe, and involved forced labour, mass shootings, and concentration camps, the latter being the basis of the Nazi ‘final solution’ (Endlösung) of the so-called Jewish problem through mass extermination in gas chambers. The last stages of the final solution were decided upon at the Nazi conference held at Wannsee in 1942. At this conference the grotesque plan and schedules were laid down, to be carried out by Adolf Eichmann. During the Holocaust an estimated six million Jews died. Out of a population of three million Jews in Poland, less than half a million remained in 1945, while Romania, Hungary, and Lithuania also suffered grievously. The Holocaust has raised many problems concerning the nature of European civilization and the influence of Christianity (the Roman Catholic Church knew what was happening but failed to raise its voice in protest).