Marie Sophie Hingst
In June 2019, the Der Spiegel journalist Martin Doerry [de] exposed Hingst's claims as false with the assistance of a team of historians and archivists.
Marie Sophie Hingst was born on 20 October 1987[1] in Wittenberg, a town in Saxony-Anhalt in what was then the German Democratic Republic (present-day eastern Germany).
[11] In addition to her "Blogger of the Year" award and Die Zeit publication, Hingst was a winner of the Financial Times Future of Europe project in 2017.
[4] In 2018, Hingst started a viral Twitter hashtag called #KunstGeschichteAlsBrotbelag ("art history on a sandwich"), based around replicating famous artworks and historical photographs with food.
[4][8] At the time of the Der Spiegel publication in June 2019, she was working at Intel in Dublin as a self-described "disruptor", a role she ascribed to her success on social media.
In 2018, the historian Gabriele Bergner [Wikidata], working alongside a lawyer, an archivist, and a genealogist, examined the details of Hingst's blog posts with other researchers.
Doerry, whose grandmother Lilli Jahn had herself been murdered at Auschwitz, was sought for his experience in this area; he had helped expose Wolfgang Seibert, a leader in Pinneberg's local Jewish community, as the perpetrator of a similar fraud the year before.
Research by Bergner, Doerry, and archivists from the Stadtarchiv Stralsund throughout the first half of 2019 led to the conclusion Hingst's claims of descent from Holocaust survivors were fraudulent.
[4][18] In June 2019, Doerry published "The Historian Who Invented 22 Holocaust Victims", an exposé of Hingst's claims, on Der Spiegel's website in German and English.
The story presented research which indicated that Hingst had falsified her Jewish background, medical work in India, and sex education outreach to refugees in Germany.
[2] Neue Zürcher Zeitung discussed the implications of the case for editorial reliability, noting that Hingst had been published in Die Zeit and referencing that Der Spiegel had themselves been taken in by the fraudulent journalist Claas Relotius the preceding year.
Scally informed his employers and Doerry that he was uncomfortable writing about Hingst for The Irish Times; he feared further publications would jeopardize her mental health, and worried he might be the last person to see her alive.
[25] Avner Ofrath [Wikidata], a scholar of Mediterranean Jewish history at the University of Bremen,[26] wrote about Hingst for the Switzerland-based European Journalism Observatory.
Ofrath particularly spoke against commentators who had ascribed Doerry's coverage of the case in part to having lost relatives of his own in the Holocaust, describing the attempts to draw such links as "reveal[ing] an astonishing lack of sensitivity".
In response to Scally's determination to remain in contact with Hingst's mother after the interview, the German professor of journalism Klaus Meier [de] lauded his ethical commitment but deemed it a level of emotional labour that would not be possible for every case.
Doerry responded to these challenges by noting the prior researchers like Bergner who had also uncovered her fraud, and said he had been sought out specifically for his previous work on similar cases.
[29] Deniz Yücel, a Turkish-German journalist who spent 336 days incarcerated in Turkey under suspicion of espionage, received postcards from Hingst during his imprisonment.
[8] In a column for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Carolin Emcke was critical of the German coverage while simultaneously recognizing the co-existing duty of care to Holocaust victims.
She posited that the situation had no easy outcomes, being deeply regretful of Hingst's suicide, but also concerned about the harm her fraud had done to living Holocaust survivors and the memory of the victims.
Doerry described Hingst in his meetings with her as "confident, combative and determined", and drew attention to the fact he had given her the opportunity to answer "a detailed list" of questions about why she had made her claims.
Writing for Die Welt, Anne Waak [de] compared Hingst to Rachel Dolezal, a former activist who falsely claimed to be of African-American descent.
By claiming to be members of marginalized groups, Hingst and Dolezal were able to present themselves as "authentic" experts on discrimination, and speak with a cultural cachet that under identity politics they would not have otherwise received.
From Ofrath's perspective, Hingst had little interest in or knowledge of Jewish life; he took offence at her claims most strongly because of her superficial understanding of European Jewry and lack of significant research into the subject.
The concept of needing to be associated with the "victims" of ethnic discrimination and genocide, rather than the "perpetrators", was compared to cases such as those of Jessica Krug, H. G. Carrillo, Laurel Rose Willson, and Binjamin Wilkomirski.
