The CODOH Revisionist Forum

Something to keep in mind when looking at daunting bibliographies.

Continuing with the theme of the previous post,



Although I think this reply raises a good point.

There's a website that allows you to search what books/readings are assigned in college courses.
https://www.opensyllabus.org/

The most assigned "Holocaust" related books appear to be these (I've added the popularity score the site uses in parentheses)

1) Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (86)
2) Primo Levi, Survival at Auschwitz (77)
3) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem (77)
4) Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (74)

And then a bit further down,
5) Art Spiegelman, Maus (64)
6) Elie Wiesel, Night (62)
7) Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (56)

From there, it seems things drop off a lot. Anne Frank I'm sure is the overall most read, but it seems to be less commonly assigned in college (scores only 17), probably because it's often assigned in middle school.

I'm surprised Browning is so high, though Ordinary Men is the most "human interest" focused of his books and so in that way it fits somewhat with the more typical memoirs and novels. Arendt's book, an essay collection, is probably the one most unlike the others.

I had not heard of the Bauman book. It's from 1989 and argues that contrary to the "conventional wisdom," the Holocaust was not a lapse into barbarism but rather distinctively "modern." Idk, it seems to me that idea was present in the earliest Holocaust propaganda. The "industrial" or assembly line mass murder, etc.

For upper level elective courses, it seems you might see authors like Longerich or Friedlander. Or if a broader Third Reich focus, maybe Kershaw and Evans. It looks like there are a variety of books assigned with moderate frequency on "genocide" more generally.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder scores a 40. So somewhat popular. It's in part about the Holocaust but it tries to integrate this with Soviet mass killing in the same territory.

I'm curious, did Tadeusz Borowski 'This Way for the Gas" make the list?

szlafrok wrote: ↑Wed Aug 12, 2026 9:44 pm I'm curious, did Tadeusz Borowski 'This Way for the Gas" make the list?

Yes, that one does get assigned. It has a popularity score of 23, a little higher than Anne Frank.

https://analytics.opensyllabus.org/sing ... 9267477360

Jan Grabowski wrote an article printed in The New York Times, the official parish newsletter of the New York Jewish community, on "The New Wave of Holocaust Revisionism" (hereafter NWOHR).

It's not as cool as The New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) but it's interesting to read what is considered "revisionism" by certain people.



The article is short and available online, so I won't summarize it too much.

He argues that Poland's commemoration of Poles who helped Jews is "Holocaust distortion," because there's not enough focus on Jewish victims and Poles who killed or exploited Jews. It's a "false equivalence" and downplaying of Polish perpetrators argument.

In Poland, apparently half of Poles associate Auschwitz as a place of Polish suffering more than Jewish.

Grabowski was even taken to court in Poland for besmirching the name of a WW2-era Polish village mayor. The court ruled that he had to apologize for harming Poles' feelings of national dignity.

The ruling was overturned, but he reports there was an obvious chilling effect on speech.

Apparently, the NWOHR is the opposite of OG revisionism, in that the NWOHR has turned the lawfare tables:

It seemed to me that the real objective of the lawsuit was not to rescue a man’s name or alter his reputation, but to frighten scholars of the Holocaust, to instill Poland’s pervasive atmosphere of fear into an entire discipline and to make students and educators think twice before choosing topics that would challenge the government-sponsored version of history.

We'll see if Poland declares antipolonism to be illegal hate speech.