'Blogger of the Year' invented ancestors who became victims of the Holocaust: exposing her killed
'06.08.2019'
Source: Lenta.ru report
“She crept up to me like a cat. She didn’t say hello, her gaze avoided me. Her cheeks were red. She walked in front of me, muttering something under her breath, ”- so the Irish journalist described a woman who was difficult to recognize until recently, a popular blogger, respected historian and philanthropist Marie Sophie Hingst. Her life changed dramatically after publishing an article in the German edition of Der Spiegel, whose author, Martin Doerry, exposed Hingst's story about her Jewish ancestors who died during the Holocaust.
Doerry stated that the woman had invented all these people and thus laughed at those who really suffered at the hands of the Nazis. About who Hingst really was and how her life completely collapsed in just a few days, in the article “Tapes.ru»
“Read, dear, read”
Marie Sophie Hingst was born in the small German town of Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, located a two-hour drive from Berlin. The girl grew up in a family of intellectuals, it was expected that she would want to connect her life with science. Hingst fell in love with the story, which she studied first in Berlin, and then in Lyon and Los Angeles.
In the 2013 year, when the young German woman went the 26 year, she moved to Irish Dublin. There, the girl entered Trinity College, the most prestigious and oldest educational institution in which Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift studied at one time. Hingst did not change her preferences and continued to study history, especially focusing on the colonial strategy of England in Ireland in the 17th century, which became the topic of her dissertation.
However, work on scientific work did not occupy all the time Hingst in the first years of her studies. It was during this period that the girl started her own blog called Read on, Dear, Read On (“Read, dear, read”), suddenly revealing to readers not only her literary talent, but also the hitherto unknown side of her past.
“Her stories convey the spirit of fairy tales,” Doerry, journalist Der Spiegel, described his impressions of the blog as he managed to read Hingst's posts before they were deleted. The main character of these “tales” is Helga Louise Brandl, the author’s grandmother on the father’s side, who survived captivity in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. The description of Brandl’s life in the form in which it was presented on her granddaughter’s blog is difficult to read without a shudder. The woman came to the Nazis with her whole family: father, mother and four sisters. Of these, only Louise survived.
She was the very person from whom Hingst, in her own words, in early childhood learned what the Holocaust is. Each summer, the grandmother gathered other survivors in German captivity, and it was the granddaughter who was obliged to draw up written invitations to the meeting and send them out. These meetings, held in the garden near the house, Hingst remembered well. The girl was forced to appear in front of the guests in a skirt, which she hated, but as soon as she saw a delicious cake and heard the beginning of soul-taking stories about the past, she forgot that she had been so upset so recently.
On the evening of November 9 of each year, Hingst's grandparents stopped at the house all the hours and sat in the gathering twilight. This was another of their traditions in memory of the 1938 Kristallnacht, when a wave of Jewish pogroms swept across Germany. Dozens of Jews were killed, and tens of thousands were imprisoned in concentration camps.
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The story of Louise’s husband’s family was no less tragic, and also suspiciously similar to the story of Louise herself. The historian's great-grandfather - Herman Hingst and his wife Marie, who had Jewish roots, were killed by the Nazis in 1942 with four of their children. Only one of their children managed to survive - grandfather Hingst.
At that time, most readers had no doubts about the veracity of the blog author’s stories. In addition, back in 2013, Hingst published on Twitter screenshots of applications to the Yad Vashem memorial complex for the victims of the Holocaust. The organization collects information about all the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, and absolutely anyone can submit an application to add a person to the list of victims. No supporting information is required, except for the signature of the applicant.
Hingst submitted to the organization information about 22 of her relatives. Among them were her father’s relatives with the names Hingst and Brandl, as well as some Rosenwasser and Zilberlicht. The author of an article in Der Spiegel suggested that these are relatives on the part of the historian’s mother.
Hingst told about the tragic fate of her family not only on the pages of her blog, but also to other people live. At the university, she began to attend meetings of Jewish society, and when there was time - discussions and round tables on this topic in other cities.
Shy in spotlights
The student’s efforts were not in vain, and four years after the public announcement of her Jewish roots, fame and recognition came to her. In 2017, the jury of the German Golden Bloggers contest awarded her the “Blogger of the Year” award. During the interview after the award ceremony, Hingst smiled shyly, thanks to those who noticed her work. Her hair starting to turn gray, a modest outfit and round glasses created the impression of a man who was completely unaccustomed to public attention, and did not aspire to it.
Just a year later, a student at Trinity College again gave teachers a reason to be proud of her success. Hingst took part in an essay competition on "The Future of Europe." It was held among six universities and was organized by the Financial Times. Hingst's work entitled “Europeans must not forget about their collective self-identity” was recognized as the best and published on the pages of an authoritative publication. At the award ceremony in Dublin, the winner compared the fate of migrants, thousands sailing to the shores of Europe, with the lives of her Jewish ancestors, persecuted by the Nazis. Such a parallel appealed to those sitting in the hall, who at that time did not spare the loud applause for the promising historian.
Almost everyone around that time thought that Hingst was a talented and multifaceted person. On the site of Trinity College, a description of her merits is devoted to a considerable paragraph, which also indicates that the German is engaged in humanitarian activities and runs a clinic for the poor in the Indian city of New Delhi. According to Hingst herself, who talked about her unusual blog experience, she not only provided medical care to local residents without the necessary education, but also educated Indian men on sex. At the same time, she managed to found a hospital back in 2007, when she was only 19 years old.
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When the historian returned to Germany, she continued part of her charity work there, namely, she applied her skills in sexual education to local refugees from Syria. Such a statement could not go unnoticed by the press, and Hingst became the heroine of ZEIT ONLINE. In an interview with reporters published on the newspaper’s website, she spoke in detail about all the nuances of her work with young guys who know so little about sex.
But the blogger’s talents didn’t end with sexual education. In March 2019, she released a book entitled “The History of Art in the Form of Sandwich Toppings”. It contained many photos of famous paintings recreated with the help of bread and laid on it sausages, cucumbers and other food. Hingst’s idea became viral, and hundreds, if not thousands of netizens around the world began making the same sandwiches and posting their masterpieces on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Hingst rested on her laurels of glory until the first day of June 2019 in Der Spiegel came out an investigation exposing her, which reduced all her successes to zero and turned the life of a blogger upside down. But some began to ask Hingst questions long before that.
Beginning of the End
One of the first to inconsistencies in the content of the blogger's posts drew the attention of a German historian and an expert on genealogical research Gabriele Bergner (Gabriele Bergner). Some of the inconsistencies could be detected without even accessing the archive data. So, on the blog, Hingst writes about the four killed sons of his great-grandfather, and in the documents submitted to Yad Vashem, there are already six of them. In the same documents, she claims that his great-grandfather died in the year 1942 in the city of Ponar located on the territory of Lithuania, although in one of his posts he recalls his tragic death in Auschwitz.
Bergner was one of the first, but by no means the only one who had questions from Hingst. Ordinary commentators questioned the blog post, but received only accusations of “unimaginable slander” and “conspiracy” from the author.
Studying the Hingst stories, Bergner realized that she was dealing not with a couple of historical inaccuracies, but with a whole web of intentionally invented facts, so she began to understand it not one, but with the help of a whole team of specialists, among whom was another genealogy historian, lawyer and archivist.
In December 2018, Bergner submitted the results of her investigation to Der Spiegel, whose journalists began to actively contribute to the work of the historian and eventually established: stories of Jewish origin Hingst - a lie. The blogger not only lied about the nationality of her ancestors, but also came up with the personality of most of them. Information about the life of 19 people, information about which she submitted to Yad Vashem, was not found in any of the archives, although the latter were preserved intact.
Only three of the relatives described by Hingst really existed. It was her great-grandfather German Hingst and his wife Marie, who lived in Stralsund. The author of the blog claimed that both were Jews and were killed by the Nazis in 1942, but in reality they died their own lives and professed Protestantism. They had three, not four children, as Hingst wrote. One of them - Rudolph - worked as a pastor in the church of his native city of Hingst - Lutherstadt-Wittenberg. Rudolph's wife was the very grandmother who so often appeared in German stories. The blogger wrote that she was born in 1922 and worked as a dentist, but did not indicate that the woman was also a Protestant.
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Before the publication of the investigation, which, no doubt, was supposed to make a fuss, journalist Der Spiegel decided to take a comment from Hingst herself. He suspected that the woman would not want to talk about her Jewish ancestors, so he persuaded her to meet on the pretext that he wanted to talk about her recently published book.
Even on the eve, Hingst specifically stipulated that she did not accept questions regarding her family, but the journalist had violated this ban. The blogger’s first reaction was righteous anger. She was indignant at the impudence of a reporter who dared to touch her personal life. However, the farther the conversation went and the more Hingst found out about the information the magazine had about her, the more carefully she spoke out. By the end of the conversation, she was completely justified by the fact that she was only retelling the stories of her grandmother and planning to double-check them herself.
When the hour-long interview was over, a woman with undisguised anger left the room without even saying goodbye to her interlocutor. It must have been at that moment that she realized that the world she had invented had begun to crumble.
Ground from under your feet
The very next day after an interview with reporter Der Spiegel, Hingst called the author of the article talking to her and appeared before him in a completely different way. Sophie was seething with indignation, she was replaced by a meek girl with a barely audible voice on the phone. She apologized for her behavior and admitted that she had said a lot of unnecessary and false.
Two days later, lawyer Hingst made an official statement. In his words, conveying the position of the client, it was stated that the posts written to her were "a literary work, not a journalistic report or a story about historical events." Thus, the woman actually admitted that her description of the incident with relatives was far from true in everything. As for the documents submitted to Yad Vashem, Hingst insisted that she only transmitted what she learned from her grandmother, and separately emphasized that she did not verify this information personally.
A week later, on June 1, an article revealing Hingst was published on Der Spiegel's website, first in German and then in English. As the blogger herself later said, at that moment her life began to disappear, piece by piece, until it was completely destroyed by the accusations that had fallen on her.
The blog itself - living proof in the hands of its opponents - Hingst immediately deleted. However, the organizers of the Golden Bloggers contest had enough of Doerry’s article to publicly declare the historian deprived of the award she received in 2017. The Hingst essay published in the Financial Times is also currently unavailable.
The Yad Vashem memorial behaved cautiously. In a commentary to reporters, their representatives stated that they had sent the information submitted by Hingst for verification and explained that they did not have the opportunity to thoroughly analyze all the documents that came to them. “Our verification process does not guarantee that the information about the person is correct. We trust those who send us information about the victims of the Holocaust, and require only a personal signature on the sheets from them, ”the organization said in a comment. A few days later, they announced that they would remove the information about Hingst’s relatives from their base.
It came to the stories of a blogger about the sexual education of Indian boys and Syrian refugees. Journalists Der Spiegel contacted the German media, which at one time published an interview with Hingst, who described in detail her communication with unenlightened guys. Reporters pointed out to colleagues that there were a lot of inaccuracies in the material they published, and given Hingst’s reputation, they could be a complete fiction. Deutschlandradio and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung have removed interviews from their sites.
These days, the blogger watched as achievements, one by one, disappear from her biography. In fact, who launched this process, Doerry was convinced that the publication of the article would be the means that would finally stop the German who had gone too far in her lies, who no longer saw the boundaries of what was permitted. He was right, but he hardly foresaw that in this way he would stop not only Hingst's lies, but her whole life.
"I feel cornered."
Irish Times journalist Derek Scully was one of the last to see Hingst alive. He met with a woman a few days after publishing an article about her in Der Spiegel, hoping that a good interview would come out of the conversation. It was never published in the publication until the blogger’s death, because during the conversation Scully realized that he was facing a man who needed urgent professional psychological help. “She said either as a cheerful girl, or as an angry adult. Her speech was interspersed with random chuckles. Her face was now blushing and pale. Her hands were constantly moving, like two ever-flying birds, ”the journalist shared his observations.
In three hours they managed to talk about a lot. Hingst showed Scully the yellow star that her grandmother allegedly wore, denied the fact that she had sent any documents at all to Yad Vashem, and stated that someone was impersonating her. I heard Scully and the story of the woman’s mother, Rachel. According to Hingst, she worked for Doctors Without Borders and therefore traveled with her daughter around the world, and then shot herself. Her lifeless body in the bathroom was discovered by the blogger herself. Describing her feelings from an article in Der Spiegel, Hingst was not shy about epithets. “It was as if they removed my skin alive. The publishing house took and seemed to hang me on a fence to dry. I feel cornered, ”she complained.
Scully knew that the woman was in an unstable state, and anticipated that something bad could happen to her. Immediately upon arrival home, he tried to track down the mother she was talking about. In the telephone directory of the historian’s hometown, he found a certain Cornelia Hingst. Calling her, he found out that she was the mother of the blogger, and Rachel did not exist at all. “My daughter has many realities, and I have only one,” she said. According to Cornelia, her daughter has long suffered from a mental illness and has repeatedly tried to be treated. Improvements in Hingst's health were outlined only in Ireland, where she finally found a good job, working as a project manager at Intel. Cornelia did not know about the documents submitted by her daughter in Yad Vashem, nor about her help to Indian young people.
Scully asked mother Hingst to talk with the blogger more often, since in this state she needed any possible support. After their first conversation, Cornelia called the journalist several times to tell her and her daughter how things were going. The employer eventually agreed not to fire the woman, and she herself admitted that she needed the help of a professional. It would seem, a few more months, and everyone will forget about this story, but Hingst will get it right, but the denouement of this story turned out to be completely different.
On Wednesday, 17 July, Marie Sophie Hingst was found dead in her bed. The police did not find traces of violent death, but the results of the autopsy are not yet known, which means that it is impossible to precisely state that Hingst committed suicide.
Her mother is convinced that her daughter took her own life due to the baiting on the Internet that she suffered after publishing an article revealing her. She laid part of the blame for her death on Doerry, who, in her opinion, for all the facts did not see the real identity of her daughter. Doerry himself, after the heroine’s death of his article, gave a great comment to the Irish Times, but did not allow him to publish.
At Trinity College, where Hingst studied, they were deeply shocked by her death. What happened there was called a big loss, because the woman was talented, kind and, in addition, helped the Irish Red Cross a lot.
In social networks, many people are at a loss and do not know how to respond to the news about the death of a exposed blogger. “I am saddened and shocked. I just can’t put my head in order, ”journalist Simon Herz shared his feelings. - Liars should be punished, but in this case I had the impression that I was watching a public execution. Was there another way to stop her? Can we learn any lesson from this? Or maybe they should? ”
