Global InformationMarie Sophie Hingst information
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. 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. 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. 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.