My own speech was on Monday afternoon. It was about An Eye for an Eye, which the Germans among the deniers wanted to hear about so they could share their parents’ guilt with the Jews, their parents’ victims. No longer did I want to tell the deniers off, but I did want to edify them (and I did) that I and the Jews in An Eye for an Eye devoutly believe that the Holocaust happened. But also I wanted to say something therapeutic, to say something about hate. At the hotel, I’d seen none of it, certainly less than I’d seen when Jews were speaking of Germans. No one had ever said anything remotely like Elie Wiesel, "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set aside a zone of hate—healthy, virile hate—for what persists in the German," and no one had said anything like Edgar Bronfman, Sr., the president of the World Jewish Congress. A shocked professor told Bronfman once, "You’re teaching a whole generation to hate thousands of Germans," and Bronfman replied, "No, I’m teaching a whole generation to hate millions of Germans." Jew-hatred like that German-hatred, or like the German-hatred on every page of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I saw absolutely none of, but I saw that some people, all Germans, had had to struggle to suppress it.

At the hotel, the Germans didn’t hate the Jews—not yet—just what the Jews were saying. "The tone of the Jewish establishment," said Zündel, the Canadian citizen, at another breakfast in the airy downstairs restaurant with me, "is so strident, offensive, grating, so denigrating of Germans, there’s going to be—’’ He stopped short.

"We are so sick of the Holocaust!" a German woman with us took up. "Gentiles have it thrown in their faces morning, noon, and night without relief. Do the Jewish people know that?"

"They convict us, imprison us, make us into outcasts," said Zündel, who was now being prosecuted in Canada for truthfully saying that Germans didn’t make soap out of Jews. "Teachers lose their jobs. Professors lose their tenure," said Zündel truthfully, "and I say this isn’t good for the Jewish community."

"I see dissatisfaction," said the German woman, "that I shudder about. I think the Jewish community has to try to lessen it. This censorship! This terrorism!" In no way did her or Zündel’s jaw get twisted like a twisted rubber band into the outward contours of hate, but the woman’s quivered at the edges somewhat.

So at the lectern in the grand ballroom on Monday, I spoke about hate. "There are," I said, "eighty-five thousand books about the Holocaust. And none has an honest answer to, How could the Germans do it? The people who gave us Beethoven, the Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, Alle Menschen werden Brüder, all men are brothers, how could the Germans perpetrate the Holocaust? This mystery, we’ve got to solve it, or we’ll keep having genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Zaire. Well," I said, "what I report in An Eye for an Eye is Lola," the heroine, the commandant of a terrible prison in Gleiwitz, Germany—"is Lola has solved it. The Jews have solved it. Because in their agony, their despair, their insanity, if you will, they felt they became like the Germans—the Nazis—themselves. And if I’d been there," I said, "I’d have become one too and now I understand why. A lot of Jews, understandably, were full of hate in 1945, they were volcanoes full of red-hot hate, they thought if they spit out the hate at the Germans, then they’d be rid of it."

"No," I continued. "It doesn’t work that way. Let’s say I’m in love with someone. I don’t tell myself, uh-oh, I’ve got inside of me two pounds of love, and if I love her and love her, then I’ll use all of my love up, I’ll be all out of love. No, I understand and we all understand that love is a paradoxical thing, that the more we send out, the more we’ve got. So why don’t we understand that about hate? If we hate, and we act on that hate, then we hate even more later on. If we spit out a drop of hate, we stimulate the saliva glands and we produce a drop-and-a-quarter of it. If we spit that out, we produce a drop-and-a-half, then two drops, three, a teaspoon, tablespoon, a Mount Saint Helen. The more we send out, the more we’ve got, until we are perpetual-motion machines, sending out hate and hate until we’ve created a holocaust." I then said emphatically, "You don’t have to be a German to become like that. You can be a Serb, a Hutu, a Jew—you can be an American. We were the ones in the Philippines.  We were the ones in Vietnam. We were the ones in Washington, D.C., for ten thousand years the home of the Anacostia Indians. They had one of their campgrounds at what now is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum."

"We all have it in us to become like Nazis," I said. "Hate, as Lola discovered, hate is a muscle, and if we want to be monsters all we have to do is exercise it. To hate the Germans, to hate the Arabs, to hate the Jews. The longer we exercise it, the bigger it gets, as if every day we curl forty pounds and, far from being worn out, in time we are curling fifty, sixty, we are the Mr. Universe of Hate, the Heinrich Himmler. We all can be hate-full people, hateful people. We can destroy the people we hate, maybe, but we surely destroy ourselves."

The people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen applauded. Loud and long they applauded, and a number of German deniers stood up. Some asked questions on Auschwitz, like why did I think that Germans meant for Jews to die, but one from Berlin, named Wolfgang, later confessed to me, "I believe that Auschwitz became unsanitary. The Jews were worked very hard, I grant you that. They died. And they had to be gotten rid of. And after they died, the SS put them into crematoriums. I won’t deny that. And maybe to scare some, the SS told them, ‘You’re next, you’re going to go up in smoke.’ And maybe…"

The conference ended on Monday. No one was ever attacked by the Jewish Defense League. The deniers (revisionists, they call themselves) meet next in Cincinnati, and they have invited me to be the keynote speaker there. I’ve said yes.