Marie Sophie Hingst

She gave specifics of when many of her relatives had been murdered that contradicted historical dates, such as reporting the deportation of her great-grandfather and his family as occurring in February 1940, when deportations of Jews to Auschwitz only began in March 1942.

Hingst's statements were at times inconsistent with each other; her claims for how many relatives were murdered differed between her blog and her Yad Vashem statements.

A focus of the blog was her grandmother, whom she presented as a strong-willed woman who rejected "the constraints of Jewish tradition".

Hingst's grandmother reportedly ran yearly summer tea parties for fellow Auschwitz survivors in Germany; Hingst, as a child, was said to have arranged invitations for such events and sat in on to listen to the narratives of the guests.

This backstory was not the only focus of the blog.

Marie Sophie Hingst (20 October 1987 – 17 July 2019) was a German historian and blogger who falsely claimed to be descended from Holocaust survivors.

Born in Wittenberg to a Protestant family, she fabricated a Jewish background and sent documentation for 22 misrepresented or non-existent relatives, who she claimed were Holocaust victims, to the official Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem.

Marie Sophie Hingst was born on 20 October 1987 in Wittenberg, a town in Saxony-Anhalt in what was then the German Democratic Republic (present-day eastern Germany).

She grew up in a university-educated family from a Protestant Christian background; her grandfather was a pastor.

She stated on her blog that in 2007, at the age of 19, she had founded a hospital in New Delhi that provided sex education.

This purported accomplishment led to her writing for Die Zeit about her experiences, under the pseudonym Sophie Roznblatt.

Her purported experiences providing sex education included working at a doctor's office in Wittenberg, where she specialized in responding to anonymous sexual education questions from refugees.

Hingst maintained the blog Read On, My Dear, Read On, writing about her supposed Jewish background and identity, along with her experiences as a German expatriate in Ireland, where she moved in 2013.

After graduating from the Liborius-Gymnasium in Dessau, Hingst studied history at university in Berlin, Lyon, Los Angeles, and eventually Dublin, which she moved to in 2013.

In 2013, she founded the blog Read On, My Dear, Read On, where she wrote about her life as a German expatriate in Ireland and her purported Jewish background and identity.

She attended Trinity College Dublin, where she completed a PhD; from 2015 to 2017, she was a fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

The blog received hundreds of thousands of views, and she was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by Die Goldenen Blogger (The Golden Bloggers).

Throughout her life, Hingst falsified much of her background, connections, and achievements.

She claimed a background in sex education, having purportedly founded a hospital in New Delhi and worked in sex education outreach to refugees in Germany.

Hingst used her fraudulent credentials to gain awards and recognition; alongside her "Blogger of the Year" recognition, she wrote for the German newspaper Die Zeit, was one of the winners of the 2017 Financial Times Future of Europe project, and held positions of prestige in Jewish communities across Europe.

Hingst was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by Die Goldenen Blogger (The Golden Bloggers), and Der Tagesspiegel reported in June 2019 that Read On, My Dear, Read On had 240,000 "regular readers".

Hingst had no Jewish ancestry on either side of her family.

She claimed her mother was a French-Israeli Médecins Sans Frontières worker who committed suicide when Hingst was 16, and that her non-Jewish birth mother was her stepmother.

She additionally constructed a Jewish background for her paternal grandparents, describing them as Holocaust survivors whose parents perished in the genocide.

Hingst reported 22 relatives whom had allegedly died in the Holocaust to Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial; most of these people were later determined to have never existed, and the remainder to not have been from a Jewish background or to be Holocaust victims.

According to later reports, she constructed this backstory shortly after her move to Dublin.

The contents of Read On, My Dear, Read On detailed this supposed family history.

Hingst claimed that her paternal grandparents were each the sole survivors of their families; her grandfather was purportedly the youngest of five sons, and her grandmother the youngest of five daughters, both of whom lost their parents and older siblings in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

When the Turkish-German journalist Deniz Yücel was imprisoned in Turkey in 2017, Hingst sent him daily postcards expressing her support.

She posted scans of each postcard on Read On, My Dear, Read On, and kept copies for herself, which she gave to Yücel after his release.

Hingst also wrote to Meşale Tolu, another German journalist imprisoned in Turkey along with her young son.

Hingst additionally fabricated several life accomplishments.

In June 2019, the Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry exposed Hingst's claims as false with the assistance of a team of historians and archivists.

She was castigated in the German media, leading to the destruction of her reputation.

Hingst committed suicide on 17 July 2019 at the age of 31.

Her fraud and death attracted attention across Europe.

German and Irish coverage of Hingst differed: German coverage focused on the extreme sensitivity of the subject she had lied about and how she should have been stopped earlier; Irish coverage focused on her mental health and accused Doerry of ignoring her vulnerability.

She was compared to other women who had been uncovered as misrepresenting their backgrounds, such as Anna Sorokin and Rachel Dolezal.

The particular similarity between Hingst and Dolezal, as people who claimed to have faced ethnic discrimination, sparked discussion of the role of identity politics in such claims.

These claims were repeated uncritically by works such as the feminist theory book Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo by Mithu Sanyal, published in 2019 by Verso Books.