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But the award was withdrawn last month after the Der Spiegel story and Yad Vashem confirmed that it would be removing Dr Hingst’s submissions from its Pages of Testimony.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.
