An award-winning German historian has been stripped of a national blogging prize after she was accused of fabricating the stories of 22 Jewish relatives who supposedly died in the Holocaust.
Marie-Sophie Hingst had drawn almost 250,000 readers to her vivid accounts of how her grandmother’s family had been all but wiped out in Auschwitz and other death camps.
Over years of archive research, she wrote, she had discovered their fates and registered their deaths with Yad Vashem, the main Israeli memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide.
An investigation by a fellow academic from Berlin, however, found that Dr Hingst’s family had been Protestants and that her great-grandfather could not have been sent to Auschwitz in 1940 because the camp had apparently not been taking prisoners from Germany at that time.
Dr Hingst, 31, who studied in Berlin, Lyons and Los Angeles before obtaining a doctorate from Trinity College Dublin, started recounting the tales ostensibly passed down to her by her Jewish grandmother in 2013 on a blog titled “Read on my dear, read on”. In September that year she travelled to Israel to fill out fifteen forms registering her fictitious dead relatives at Yad Vashem then submitted another seven electronically.
She explained that her great-grandfather and his wife had been murdered in Auschwitz along with four of their daughters, leaving only her grandmother to carry on the family line.
Read the article by Oliver Moody in The Australian (from The Times).