Raul Hilberg's 'Destuction of the European Jews' and Saul Friedlander's 'Years of Persecution' and 'Years of Extermination' seem to represent two different, even contradictory historical approaches to the Shoah. Emphasising the role of the perpetrators as a 'key' and the perpetrators as a 'primary path' (Hilberg) is different from Friedlander's approach as an integrated history. Both agree on the dilemma posed by the question of how to speak about the Holocaust