Provan, the only speaker (other than me) who believed that the Holocaust happened, spoke in the ballroom later on. He spoke about a Jewish coroner at Auschwitz and not about his "No holes?  No Holocaust?" monograph or his one other epoch-making discovery. In the cyanide chambers at Auschwitz there are no cyanide stains, and the deniers, though they’ve never worn a T-shirt saying NO CYANIDE?  NOBODY DIED! call this another proof that what we call cyanide chambers were, in fact, innocuous morgues. But according to Provan, the chambers have no stains because the Germans painted their walls.

Sixteen other speakers spoke on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, for this was a holiday weekend, and I counted six who’d run afoul of the law because of their disbelief in the Holocaust and the death apparatus at Auschwitz. To profess this in anyone’s earshot is illegal not just in Germany but in Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Poland and Israel, where denying the Holocaust can get you five years while denying God can get you just one. One speaker, David Irving, had been fined $18,000 for saying aloud in Germany that one of the cyanide chambers at Auschwitz is a replica built by the Poles after the war. A replica it truly is, but truth in these matters is no defense in Germany. Another speaker, a Frenchman, had been fined in France, and another speaker, a German, had been sentenced to fourteen months in Germany but, his landlord evicting him, his wife deserting him, had fled to England. Another speaker, an Australian, had come from seven months in a German jail for writing in Australia (alas, on the Internet, which Germans in Germany can read) that there were no cyanide chambers at Auschwitz. In his defense, he’d called on an expert witness, but the man couldn’t testify or he’d be jailed too, the victim of the selfsame law. The fifth speaker was a Swiss, a man who I’d once roomed with (I’d met many deniers previously) and fed the kangaroos with in South Australia.  He’ll go to jail for fifteen months in Switzerland for questioning the Auschwitz cyanide chambers.

In the United States, thank God, we have the First Amendment. But even in that shuttered ballroom in California, the sixth speaker couldn’t say all he wanted to, couldn’t, for example, say the Germans didn’t kill the Jews deliberately. A few hours earlier, he and I had debated this at a waffle breakfast, debated it in audible voices with no qualms of being arrested, indicted or imprisoned by Federal marshals. "But what about Eichmann?" I’d asked him. "He wrote that Hitler ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. He wrote about vergasungslager, gassing camps."

"John. The man was in Israeli captivity."

"Well, what about during the war? Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland, said to exterminate all the Jews, without exception."

"He was only quoted as saying that, John."

"And what about Goebbels? He said a barbaric method was being employed against the Jews. And Himmler? He said the SS knew what a hundred, five hundred, one thousand corpses were like."

"John, I don’t know. They might have said it. But," the sixth speaker told me, "it isn’t true that genocide was a German national policy." A few hours later, the speaker didn’t dare repeat this up in the ballroom, for he’s a Canadian citizen and he was carried live on the Internet in Canada and, if he said what he’d said over waffles, he’d have been prosecuted in Canada. Already, he’d been tried twice, as well as hit, beaten, bombed, engulfed by a $400,000 fire, and told, "We’ll cut your testicles off."

The man’s name is Ernst Zündel, he’s round-faced and red-faced like in a Hals, he’s eternally jolly and he was born in Calmbach, Germany. If you saw the recent movie about the Holocaust deniers, Mr. Death, he’s the man in the hard hat who says, "We Germans will not go down in history as genocidal maniacs. We—will—not."  He, like every denier, has been called antisemitic, but it’s more honest to say that the Jews who (along with God) oversee the Jewish community are in fact anti-Zündelic, anti-Countessic, anti-Irvingic and, in one word, anti-denieric. The normal constraints of time, temperance, truth do not obstruct some Jewish leaders from their non-stop vituperation of Holocaust deniers. "They’re morally ugly," "They’re morally sick," said Elie Wiesel on the Public Broadcasting Service. They bombard us with disinformation, said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, on the op-ed page of The New York Times. "Holocaust deniers," said Foxman, spouting disinformation himself, "would have [us] believe there were no concentration camps." Myself, I disagree with the Jewish leaders. Most deniers, most attendees in their slacks and shorts at the palm-filled hotel, were like Zündel: were decent people who, as Germans, had chosen to comfort themselves with the wishful thinking that none of their countrymen in the 1940s were genocidal maniacs.

I can sympathize with the Germans, for I’ve seen the same denial among the Jews. Seven years ago, I ruefully reported in An Eye for an Eye that thousands of Jews who’d survived the Holocaust had rounded up Germans and beat, whipped, tortured and murdered them—German men, women, children and babies—in 1,255 concentration camps run by Jews. This little holocaust (it wasn’t so little to Germans) was corroborated by 60 Minutes and The New York Times but not by Jewish leaders. They, pardon the expression, denied it, writing reviews whose titles were The Big Lie and False Witness and Do Me a Favor—Don’t Read This Book. If Jews feel pressed to deny what happened to sixty thousand Germans, then Jews might forgive the Germans, like Zündel, who choose to deny what happened to six million Jews.

Instead, the Jewish leaders hound them. Astronomers don’t spill rivers of ink denouncing the UFO fanatics, whose theories are much less malignant but whose legions are much, much larger than the dozen dozen deniers at that international conference, their first in six slow-moving years.  But for various reasons (for reparations, for the survival of Israel, or for real apprehensions that it could happen again) the Jewish leaders want the Holocaust to be front and center in America’s consciousness. In this they've succeeded spectacularly. Americans who aren’t senior citizens think it was partly to save the Jews that we declared war on Germany, though that was no factor at all. Americans who don’t know if one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, or one million of our own soldiers died (and surely don’t know that fifty million people died in China) know exactly how many Jews died in World War II. Once, said Michael Berenbaum, the former research director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, "the Holocaust was a side story of World War II. Now one thinks of World War II as a background story [to] the Holocaust." Among many ways the Jewish leaders accomplished this was to tap out an SOS, an all-points alarm, whenever in any dark corner it spotted a knavish denier.

They may have adopted this from Jakob Böhme, a German mystic of Shakespeare’s time. Böhme once said, "Nothing becomes manifest without opposition, for if it has nothing to oppose it, it slowly moves away from itself and does not return." Lest the Holocaust become unmanifest, lest the Holocaust move away from itself, Jewish leaders constantly point to the opposition, the bogeyman, the bugaboo, the otherwise ineffectual squad of Holocaust deniers. But there’s a double edge to Böhme’s sword. By opposing, opposing, opposing them in print, on the radio, and on TV, the Jewish leaders make the deniers manifest too. The deniers, much like the Jews, survive because they are being persecuted.  They survive to spread their doctrine to the true Jew haters of the world.