A German historian who falsely claimed that she had family members who were murdered in the Holocaust has been found dead at the age of 31, just weeks after her fabrication was uncovered.
Marie Sophie Hingst, a who obtained a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin, was found dead in her apartment in the Irish capital earlier this month. Police have said there was no sign of third party involvement in her death.
In an article in Der Speigel magazine last month, Dr Hingst was accused of having fabricated 22 Holocaust victims, whom she had described as members of her own family.
The story, written by German journalist Martin Doerry, revealed that in 2013 Dr Hingst had submitted the names and details of the 22 individuals to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial – but that German archives showed that only three of those people had ever existed and that those were neither Jewish nor Holocaust victims.
Dr Hingst used her blog, "Read On My Dear, Read On”, to promote the stories about her supposed relatives. She also talked about her grandmother, who, Dr Hingst claimed, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Mr Doerry discovered she was in fact a Protestant and not a Holocaust survivor at all.
The blog was reaching hundreds of thousands of regular readers. Its author won a “Golden Blogger” award in 2017.
But the award was withdrawn last month after the Der Spiegel story and Yad Vashem confirmed that it would be removing Dr Hingst’s submissions from its Pages of Testimony.
Mr Doerry, himself the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, said in his article Dr Hingst’s actions “may not be a crime per se, but it is nevertheless scandalous. Inventing Holocaust victims is essentially a mockery of all those who really were tortured and killed by the Nazis.”
He ended by writing “the Germans already murdered 6 million Jews. And now they wanted to invent another 22 victims?
In an Irish Times piece published after the academic's death, Dr Hingst's mother said her daughter had a history of mental health issues.
The paper's Berlin correspondent Derek Scally wrote Dr Hingst had shown him a yellow cloth star with the word “Jude” on it, claiming that the star and a pair of smashed glasses were all that her grandmother had when she was liberated from Auschwitz.
She also claimed that her mother, Cornelia Hingst, was actually her stepmother and that her real birth mother was Jewish and had died by suicide when she was young.
When Mr Scally subsequently contacted Cornelia Hingst, she told him it was not true.
“My daughter has many realities and I only have access to one,” she told him.
Marie Sophie Hingst will be buried in her hometown of Wittenburg on Wednesday.
