Claude Laharie was a history professor at the University of Pau, France, a large city near the Gurs camp. The focus of his research on the history of WWII and the Gurs camp resulted in his book, Le Camp De Gurs: 1939-1945: Un aspect méconnu de l’histoire de Vichy (1985) which was the first major historical work on the camp to be written in the forty years after the end of the war, translated into English by Thomas Durnford.

In 2021 he authored Les Basses-Pyrénées dans le Seconde Guerre Mondiale. He was instrumental in the founding of the Amicale du camp de Gurs, the organization that keeps the history of the camp current and the actual site accessible. Holding a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, the late Michael Marrus was Professor of History and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. He was a senior fellow of Massey College until 2017 and was the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies. In 1981 Marrus co-authored with Robert Paxton Vichy France and the Jews, which demonstrated that the anti-semitism of Vichy France was not imposed from without. Vichy was more homicidal and antisemitic than was the then-current belief,the Vichy administration playing a significant role in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps.