Ingrid Rimland is an example of an extremist who has achieved notoriety solely through the Internet. Rimland, who lives in Carlsbad, California, is the webmaster of what everyone thought was Ernst Zündel's Zündelsite but which has recently been renamed Ingrid Rimland's Zündelsite. This claim of ownership is part of Rimland's campaign to help Zündel fight the charge that, as the site owner and operator, he has violated Canadian hate crimes laws. Whatever her role in its development and management, there is no doubt that she plays an important role in the Zündelsite's operation. Describing herself "a stylist, first and last an Aryan writer cognizant of words. . .," and lecturer with a "flourishing" speaking career, Ingrid Rimland has, since early 1996, been actively promoting Holocaust denial on the World Wide Web. She writes a daily column, a stream of neo-Nazi

"Next time you call me a Nazi — you will do so with genuine respect!" -- Ingrid Rimland

cheerleading and anti-Semitic invective called "Z-Grams," proclaiming Holocaust "revisionism to the world."

An eager acolyte and fervent admirer of Ernst Zündel, Rimland shares and peddles his "revised" version of history. Rimland and Zündel also share a common childhood experience: they lived through the total defeat of the Nazis -- he in Germany, she in the Ukraine -- a defeat both lament. Today, they both express profound admiration for Hitler and National Socialism.

Born in 1936 in the Ukraine, Rimland, in a brief autobiography published on her personal Web site, describes her family as "German-descent Mennonite wheat farmers... who had been persecuted in [Stalin's] Soviet Union..." Her personal experiences make their way into her novels as in a work-in-progress she has described on her Web site. Titled "Lebensraum," it will be a multi-part epic about the loss of ethnic identity. In it she plans to show that World War II was fought "for the benefit of a shadowy power" that used a "relentlessly liberal media" to convince Americans that the war had been "unleashed by Germany to hurt and decimate the Jews." In the work, she says she will portray Hitler's Germany as offering "the hope that rescue and delivery [would] be sent to [the ethnic Germans living in Russia]." The story of Hitler's invasion of Russia will be presented as an initially "spectacular success" that was transformed into "an almost apocalyptic rush into terror, defeat and disaster."

Given the obvious sympathies of her family, it is no wonder that they left the Soviet Union in 1943 with the retreating German army. But finding Germany "a devastated wasteland," her family moved on "to the rain forests of Paraguay" where she later married and had children.

In the 1960s she was on the move again, migrating to Canada in 1960 and then, in 1967, to the United States. There she went to college, and personally interested in the education of special-needs children, eventually earned an Ed.D. Since coming to the United States, Rimland has written three books, two of which are based, in part, on her personal experiences. One of these, The Wanderers, is an account of the Mennonite "exodus out of the Ukraine in 1943."

Rimland's personal Web pages advertise her writing and speaking, indicating that her areas of emphasis are Special Education, Migrant Education, Literature and History.

"Holocaust teaching. . .is the rape of the mind of America's children. . . intellectual, emotional and spiritual rape of the mind." -- Ingrid Rimland

One page has a list of her speaking engagements. It includes a number of major universities including Stanford and the University of Wisconsin, numerous workshops sponsored by the National Education Association, various organizations such as the American Association of University Women, Federated Women's Club, the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs. And though her Web site media page shows that she has been a guest on several of Ernst Zündel's radio program, she doesn't identify Zündel or give any but the most oblique indication of his or her views about Hitler and the Holocaust.

While she is cautious on a site that can be used as a professional reference, experience and education have not diminished her sense of injury, persecution and victimization. Rimland has an unshakable belief in the righteousness of her cause despite its long, ignoble history. She proudly claims the label "Nazi" and while doing so cynically appropriates a symbol of resistance to the very race-based hatred she embraces:

I have thought about this a lot — and I will tell you here and now that, in the not-too-distant future I will, like Rosa Parks, get up from the back of the bus, stare down my opposition and say to the rest of the world:

'Next time you call me a Nazi — you will do so with genuine respect!' What's more, I know precisely how. Will it be all that difficult! I don't think so.

She rises in high dudgeon to denounce those who attack her views as gross distortions of history willfully constructed to further her anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi views. Her enemies are "Holohoaxers" or "Holohuggers" who try to destroy the ethnic pride of Aryans:

We [of German descent] have been decimated horribly. . . And now we must rebuild. . . . We have been deceived in the most vicious, cruel way, about most anything pertaining to [World War II]. We have been lied to and lied to and lied to — and that includes what National Socialism was really all about. It was NOT about a witch hunt to kill every Jew in sight.

The Holocaust, in her view, is emblematic of this assault. "Holocaust teaching" she writes, "is. . . child abuse. It is adult abuse. It is ethnic abuse.

Rimland knows who is responsible for this "distortion" of history: it is ZOG, the "Zionist Occupation Government."

I want to go on record that it is soul-abuse." It is the "rape of the mind of America's children. . . intellectual, emotional and spiritual rape of the mind."

Rimland knows who is responsible for this "distortion" of history: it is ZOG, the "Zionist Occupation Government." She does acknowledge, presumably to fend off the charge that she is an anti-Semite, that not all Jews are part of ZOG. But she insists that "many influential Jews are, and when writers like myself use this term, not only are these Jews addressed, but also. . . their nest-fouling toadies, lackeys and yes-men who come out of the Aryan ranks."

Rimland's goal is identical to that of other Holocaust deniers; destroy the memory of the Holocaust and it might just be possible, by relativizing the rest of the history, to reconstruct the mythic Hitler who, in an article reprinted by Rimland, is described as "the most notable figure of the 20th century, [the man] who directed the miraculous transformation of a broken [Germany] into the most progressive and advanced Nation of its time."

I would like to see a respectful attitude developed about the Hitler times and what Hitler REALLY tried to do.

It seems to me that we are willing to believe most anything bad about what 'the Jews' have said and done but here in America we are not willing to say: 'the demonization of Hitler was, and is, systematic, vicious, unrelenting, and thoroughly unfair and it is of Jewish origin.'

Each day Rimland pushes material such as this out onto the Internet, expressing confidence that she and her fellow anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi Holocaust deniers are having a terrific impact on the prevailing view of history.

Rimland's impact on Internet users as a group cannot be really determined. She claims a significant amount of activity on the Zündelsite but there is no established auditing procedures for validating such claims and one must consider the source. What is clear is that she now plays a role in the world of Holocaust denial. About a year ago, she inadvertently printed the names of the subscribers to her electronic mailing list. Some of those on the list are the stalwarts of the denier crowd — Greg Raven, of the Institute for Historical Review, Bradley Smith, Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Some are known racists and anti-Semites such as Don Black and Louis Beam. Others, less well-known, are people whose E-mail addresses frequently show up in the various extremist areas of the Internet.

Regardless of who really runs the Zündelsite, it seems clear that Ingrid Rimland has joined with Ernst Zündel to help shape the rhetoric of Holocaust denial on the Internet and to create a sense of solidarity among the widely dispersed cyberspace extremists. 

Next: David Irving