Ingrid Rimland

Ingrid Rimland
Born	(1936-05-22) May 22, 1936 Molotschna, Ukraine
Died	Tennessee, United States
Occupation	Author and child psychologist
Nationality	Soviet Union, Paraguay, United States
Ethnicity	Black Sea German
Notable works	The Wanderers
Website
www.soaringeaglesgallery.com

Ingrid Rimland (May 22, 1936 in Halbstadt (Molotschna) in Ukraine - October 12, 2017 in Tennessee, United States) was a Ukrainian-born American author, child psychologist, activist, former social worker, and holocaust denier. She wrote several novels loosely based upon her own experiences from growing up in a Mennonite community in Ukraine and as a refugee child during World War II. Her novel The Wanderers (1977), 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.

It was reported that Ingrid had died on October 12, 2017.

Biography

Born into a Russian-German Mennonite community in Ukraine she grew up trilingual (German, Russian and Ukrainian) 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 a Siberian concentration camp by the Soviets and she never saw him again. Most of her family was exterminated by the Soviets. 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 in the rainforests of Paraguay in 1948, with the help of Dutch and American Mennonites.

In Paraguay, Rimland married and had children. She moved to Canada in 1960 and to the United States in 1967, becoming a US citizen. In the US, she gained a doctorate in education in 1979 and worked as an educational psychologist in California public schools, specializing in special education and migrant education for children, and simultaneously running a private practice in child psychology.

Literary work

Most of her literary work is autobiographical to various extent. Her 1977 novel The Wanderers traces the decimation of a pacifist people 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. Her trilogy Lebensraum (literally, "life-space"), published after her political conversion to fascism, received less favorable reviews.

Political activism

In her third, and least known, book, Demon Doctor, Rimland tells of her quest to find Josef Mengele in the 1980s with the help of Simon Wiesenthal.

In the 1990s, Rimland met and befriended German-Canadian Ernst Zündel, who later became her second husband. She became involved in right-wing causes, acting as the ostensible manager of Zündel's controversial holocaust denial website.

Following his deportation from the United States and imprisonment in Germany, she and Zündel met a few times a year until he died in August 2017, two months before her own death on October 12 of that same year.

External links

• Personal website
• Ingrid Rimland interviewed about her life in 1998 by her husband-to-be on YouTube