"I'm haunted by the thought that in a hundred years, or even fifty, historians will submit the concentration camp system of the Second World War to investigation and by the thought of what they will discover. The file is rotten." - Michel de Boüard, French historian and former camp inmate, in 1986 .

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From another translation of the interview published in Ouest-France (August 2-3, 1986, p. 6). The journalist asks:

You were president of the Calvados (Normandy) Association of Deportees, and you resigned in May, 1985, why?

Michel de Boüard replies:

I found myself torn between my conscience as a historian and the duties it implies, and on the other hand, my membership in a group of comrades whom I deeply love, but who refuse to recognize the necessity of dealing with the deportation as a historical fact in accordance with sound historical methods. I am haunted by the thought that in 100 years or even 50 years the historians will question themselves on the 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 a considerable amount of fantasies, inaccuracies, obstinately repeated (in particular concerning numbers), heterogeneous mixtures, generalizations and, on the other hand, very close critical studies that demonstrate the inanity of those exaggerations. I fear that those future historians might then say that the deportation, when all is said and done, must have been a myth. There lies the danger. That haunts me.

Earlier in the interview, de Boüard disowned his previous assertion that there had been a gas chamber at Mauthausen:

In the monograph on Mauthausen that I published in Revue d’Histoire de la [Deuxième] Guerre mondiale in 1954, I mentioned a gas chamber on two occasions. When the time of reflection had arrived, I said to myself: where did you arrive at the conviction that there was a gas chamber in Mauthausen? This cannot have been during my stay in this camp, for neither myself nor anybody else ever suspected that there was one there.

This must therefore be a piece of ‘baggage’ that I picked up after the war; this was [an] admitted [fact] but I noticed that in my text -- although I have the habit of supporting most of my affirmations by references -- there was none referring to the gas chamber.

These comments were referenced in a 1995 interview, by Jean-Claude Pressac -- who, after publishing three anti-revisionist books, had slowly moved (back) towards a more revisionist perspective. (The interview was published in 2000, in a book by Valérie Igounet, 'Histoire du négationnisme en France'.) Pressac said:

Michel de Boüard, former "Nacht und Nebel" at Mauthausen, considered that "the dossier [on the concentration camp system] is rotten". On the one hand, resentment and vendetta prevailed over conciliation. Then memory over history. On the other hand, the communists' grip on the main organs of command in the camps, the setting up after the liberation of associations under their control and the establishment for fifty years of a "peoples' democratic" history of the camps have introduced the virus of antifascist cant.

Approximation, exaggeration, omission and lying characterise the majority of the accounts of that period. The unanimous and irrevocable discredit in which the communist writings are held can only rub off on a concentration camp experience tainted by their ideas and annihilate it. — Can things be put back on an even keel? It is too late. An overall rectification is humanly and materially impossible.

Any historical change brings on a depreciation of this set memory presented as definitive. However, new documents will inevitably spring forth and will disrupt the official certainties more and more. The current form, although triumphant, of the presentation of the camp universe is doomed. What will be salvaged of it? Little.

In effect, glorifying the concentration camp universe amounts to solving the squaring of the circle, to transmuting black into white. The conscience of peoples doesn't like sad stories. A zombie's life isn't a "growth area", all the less so when the pain endured has subsequently been exploited and turned into benefits: decorations, pensions, positions, political influence. One cannot be both victim and privileged, with a turn at being executioner as well. — Of all these facts, terrible because having caused the death of women, children and old people, only the established ones will survive. The others are bound for the rubbish bins of History.

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• Pressac's Capituation - by Robert Faurisson

• Was Pressac a secret revisionist? Germar Rudolf thinks so .

• Jürgen Graf's 2003 obituary for Jean-Claude Pressac .

• Initial article also makes that point that, "In France the terms déporté, déportation , etc. connote more than deportation: they embrace the entire concentration camp experience."