Ingrid A. Rimland, also known as Ingrid Zündel, was a writer. She wrote several novels based upon her own experiences growing up in a Mennonite community in Ukraine and as a refugee child during World War II. Her novel The Wanderers, which won her the California Literature Medal Award for best fiction, tells the story of the plight of Mennonite women caught in the social upheavals of revolution and war. Rimland died on October 12, 2017.
Biography
Born into a Russian-German Mennonite community in Ukraine she grew up trilingual in the then-Soviet Union. Her family had been wealthy prior to the Russian revolution, but the community faced persecution under the communist regime due to their pacifist beliefs and heritage. In 1941, when she was five years old, her father was deported to Siberia. Fleeing the Red Army, she ended up in Germany with her mother in 1945. After several years as a refugee, they emigrated to an isolated Mennonite community of Volendam in the rainforests of Paraguay in 1948, with the help of Dutch and American Mennonites. In Paraguay, she married and had one son. The family immigrated to Canada in 1960, settling in St. Catharines, Ontario, where their second son was born, and then to the United States in 1967, where she eventually became a US citizen. In 1971, she graduated from Wichita State University with a bachelor's degree. She earned a Master's and then, in 1979, a doctorate of education from the University of the Pacific, California. Rimland worked as an educational psychologist in California public schools, specializing in special education and migrant education for children. She later worked in the state as an education consultant and testing specialist in an area consisting of six school districts comprising approximately 40 schools, and simultaneously running a private practice in child psychology.
Literary works
Most of her literary work is autobiographical to various extents. Her 1977 novel The Wanderers traces the decimation of the pacifist Russian Mennonite community during the Russian Revolution, anarchy, famine, the Stalinist purges, escape from Ukraine, and eventual resettlement in the rain forests of Paraguay. Her 1984 book, The Furies and the Flame, is her autobiography as an immigrant and deals with her struggle to raise her handicapped child. In her third, and least known, book, Demon Doctor, Rimland tells of her quest to find Nazi war criminalJosef Mengele in the 1980s with the help of, notably, Simon Wiesenthal. She had believed that Mengele worked as a doctor in her Paraguayan Mennonite community of Volendam, but was unable to prove this. Her trilogy Lebensraum, was written after her conversion to Holocaust denial in the 1990s and is a "Mennonite history saga, permeated with anti-Semitism and romantic German nationalism."
In September 1994, Rimland first met German Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, who then resident in Canada, at the twelfth International Revisionist Conference held by the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denying organisation. Interviewed by Zündel on his television programs at the time, she said Adolf Hitler “brought into our colonies the values that we had always held dear, namely the family cohesion, the pride in race, which was part of my upbringing.” She founded his website Zundelsite.org from her home in California.In 2001, Zündel became her second husband in 2001 and the couple moved to Tennessee. Around 2011, Rimland produced the film Off Your Knees, Germany! which were about Zündel's two trials in Canada for deliberately publishing "false news" about the Holocaust. It depicted Zündel as a victim of Jewish interests supposedly conspiring to deny him the right to convey his opinions on Germany and the Second War War. When Zündel died in August 2017, The New York Times contacted Rimland: "Whoever calls will get the same answer from me: I will give no comment because the mainstream media is too biased".
