Boüard, Michel de

Michel de Boüard (5 Aug. 1909 – 28 April 1989) was professor of history at the University of Caen since 1940. An active communist since 1942, he was eventually deported to the Mauthausen Camp. After the war, he wrote several articles about his wartime experiences. When confronted with Henri Roques’s PhD thesis critiquing the so-called confessions of Kurt Gerstein, he changed his mind about the quality of the historical record on the German World-War-II World War camps (Lebailly 1988):

“I am haunted by the thought that in 100 years or even 50 years the historians will question themselves on this particular aspect of the Second World War which is the concentration camp system and what they will find out. The record is rotten to the core. On one hand, [we have] a considerable amount of fantasies, inaccuracies, obstinately repeated (in particular concerning numbers), heterogeneous mixtures, generalizations and, on the other hand, very dry critical studies that demonstrate the absurdity of those exaggerations.”