German historian Marie Sophie Hingst, well-known for her weblog about family members who perished in the Holocaust, has been caught in a lie. The revelation additionally put the media, which printed her different ‘personal stories’, in a bind.
Hingst, who lives in Dublin, rose to prominence as a result of of her tales about her alleged Jewish ancestors, who tragically died in the instances of the Holocaust. These had been printed on her weblog ‘Read on my dear, read on’ (now offline), which she began again in 2013 in Dublin. The weblog featured accounts of her grandfather particularly, who she mentioned was killed in the Nazi demise camp Auschwitz.
Her exploits didn’t go unnoticed as, sooner or later, her weblog reached a whopping 240,000 readers whereas she was named‘blogger of the year’ and awarded by the Golden Bloggers affiliation – the group behind one of the main German social media influencers’ awards.
Hingst was additionally invited to average panel discussions for the affiliation of patrons of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and regularly spoke on behalf of kin of the Holocaust victims, in line with the German press.
However, her tales which awoke such an echo in her readers’ hearts turned out to be fully made up, as a gaggle of archivists from the German city of Stralsund demonstrated. Hingst certainly talked about Stralsund as the dwelling city of her family – and rightly so. The city archivists, who had been alerted by one other German historian about the inaccuracies in her weblog posts, discovered, although, that her grandfather had by no means been despatched to Auschwitz and was not even a Jew.
He was a Protestant pastor and his spouse was a dentist and in addition a follower of Protestantism, in line with Der Spiegel weekly, which was the first to break the story. Actually, none of her kin had been victims of the Holocaust, in line with the German media.