German Historian Who Faked Family Holocaust History Dies At 31
Sophie Marie Hingst Image by Facebook
BERLIN (JTA) – German historian and blogger Marie Sophie Hingst, whose invention of a family Holocaust history was outed in a Spiegel Magazine article in June, has died in Dublin at the age of 31.
She was found dead in her apartment on July 17. Police have not confirmed the cause of death, but said no foul play is suspected.
In June, Hingst was stripped of a “Golden Blogger” award following revelations that she faked a family history of suffering in the Holocaust.
According to Der Spiegel magazine, which broke the story last month, Hingst sent 22 pages of testimony for nonexistent people to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and archive, in 2013. She reported about her “family” in her blog, titled “Read on my dear, read on.” She later took the blog off line, and her writings appear to be lost.
Dublin-based journalist Derek Scally, who interviewed Hingst for the Times of Ireland said it was clear to him that she suffered from mental illness. Hingst’s mother told Scully her daughter had several personalities.
Hingst, who had earned a degree in history at Trinity College in Dublin and was working for the hi-tech company Intel, had admitted to Spiegel magazine editor Martin Doerry that she had invented the family history; she called her award-winning blog literature, but Doerry concluded that she sometimes seemed to believe what she had invented.
After Doerry’s article was published, Hingst told Scally that she felt she had been “skinned alive.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
