The events known as the Holocaust have sparked much debate and controversy among historians. At the heart of this varied dispute are the intentions and motivations of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen's controversial but successful book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" has in many ways reignited the debate and sparked renewed interest among scholars. and the public. At the heart of Goldhagen's controversial argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely and willingly participated in the atrocities due to deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. In many ways, this challenges earlier work such as Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland", which arguably gives a more complex explanation of the perpetrators' motivations by focusing on circumstances and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented very differently by each historian. To contrast this, I have chosen to focus on describing an event that both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of approximately 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13, 1942 (Browning: 2001: 225). This example clearly highlights how each historian presents authors in different ways: the use of language, images, stylistic devices, and quotations, as a means of supporting their own argument. To do this, I will focus on how different aspects of the massacre are portrayed and how this affects the presentation of the per...... middle of paper ......gen which portrays the police officers as “ordinary” ones. Germans” who voluntarily participated in the massacre. This means that it depicts them as a whole, who all reacted the same way because they were all socially conditioned into eliminationist anti-Semitism. It is for this reason that a completely different portrait of the perpetrators of the Holocaust is offered in each book, each defined by how each historian perceives the way the Germans worked. Works Cited Browning, Christoper R. (2001) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Penguin Books: London)Goldhagen, Daniel J. (1997) Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Abacus: London)Wood, Nancy (1999) Vectors of memory: legacies of trauma in post-war Europe, (Oxford)Shandley, Robert R. (1998) Reluctant Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, (University of Minnesota Press)