The making of a Holocaust denier : Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and gender in white supremacy, 1945–2000

Abstract

The novelist Ingrid Rimland became a prominent Holocaust denier in North America during the 1990s. Before embracing neo-Nazism, Rimland won acclaim within the Mennonite church—the Christian denomination in which she was raised—for her writings about women's hardships in the Soviet Union. Her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), reflected widespread efforts to position feminized Mennonite suffering as comparable to Jewish persecution under Nazism, coupled with silence about the role individual Mennonites played in the Holocaust. The church's male-dominated elite offered Rimland limited structural support as a female writer, however, and she struggled to sustain her literary career while raising a son with disabilities. Patriarchal constraints alongside Mennonite leaders' failure to address historic antisemitism helped allow her drift into white supremacy.