{"id":189320,"date":"2019-06-03T07:42:55","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T07:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=189320"},"modified":"2019-06-07T07:12:12","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T07:12:12","slug":"german-blogger-of-the-year-invented-her-jewish-family-history-cheated-media-for-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=189320","title":{"rendered":"German \u2018blogger of the year\u2019 invented her \u2018Jewish\u2019 family history, cheated media for years"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\">RT \u2013 June 2, 2019<\/h1>\n<div id=\"attachment_189323\" style=\"width: 550px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Marie-Sophie-Hingst.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-189323\" class=\"wp-image-189323\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Marie-Sophie-Hingst.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"540\" height=\"304\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Marie-Sophie-Hingst.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Marie-Sophie-Hingst-300x169.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-189323\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Marie Sophie Hingst. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">German historian Marie Sophie Hingst, famous for her blog about family members who perished in the Holocaust, has been caught in a lie. The revelation also put the media, which published her other \u2018personal stories\u2019, in a bind.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Hingst, who lives in Dublin, rose to prominence because of her stories about her alleged Jewish ancestors, who tragically died in the times of the Holocaust. These were published on her blog <em>\u2018Read on my dear, read on\u2019 <\/em>(now <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #ccffff; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/readonmydear.com\/\">offline<\/a><\/strong><\/span>), which she started back in 2013 in Dublin. The blog featured accounts of her grandfather in particular, who she said was killed in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Her exploits did not go unnoticed as, at some point, her blog reached a whopping 240,000 readers while she was\u00a0<a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/die-goldenen-blogger.de\/\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>named<\/strong><\/span><\/a> <em>\u2018blogger of the year\u2019<\/em> and awarded by the Golden Bloggers association \u2013 the group behind one of the major German social media influencers\u2019 awards.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Hingst was also invited to moderate panel discussions for the association of patrons of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and frequently spoke on behalf of relatives of the Holocaust victims, according to the German press.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Claas Relotius carved his way to pages of prestigious German newspapers with curious, sentimental and touching human stories from everyday life <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/48JTm7Vqhr\">https:\/\/t.co\/48JTm7Vqhr<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; RT (@RT_com) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/RT_com\/status\/1076588186300600320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 22, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">However, her stories which awoke such an echo in her readers\u2019 hearts turned out to be completely made up, as a group of archivists from the German town of Stralsund demonstrated. Hingst indeed mentioned Stralsund as the home town of her family \u2013 and rightly so. The town archivists, who were alerted by another German historian about the inaccuracies in her blog posts, found out, though, that her grandfather had never been sent to Auschwitz and was not even a Jew.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">He was a Protestant pastor and his wife was a dentist and also a follower of Protestantism, according to Der Spiegel weekly, which was the first to <a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/plus\/marie-sophie-hingst-die-historikerin-die-22-holocaust-opfer-erfunden-hat-a-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000164179841\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>break<\/strong><\/span><\/a> the story. Actually, none of her relatives were victims of the Holocaust, according to the German media.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">This situation looks even more bizarre in the light of the fact that Hingst, who is now in hot water over her bogus stories, did not just manage to persuade her sizeable audience about the existence of as many as 22 fictional Jewish relatives but even deceived Israel\u2019s Jerusalem-based Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and got them to put her <em>&#8216;relatives&#8217;<\/em> in their official remembrance lists by sending them fake <em>\u2018Pages of Testimony\u2019<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Now, the German Foreign Ministry has had to alert the memorial about the recent revelations related to the blogger. Hingst herself apparently does not see the problem with her years-long hoax. The historian told Der Spiegel through her lawyer that her blog entries were written with a <em>\u201cconsiderable degree of artistic freedom.\u201d<\/em> She also explained that she did it not for the sake of fame but allegedly to combat severe depression. <em>\u201cThis is literature, not journalism or historiography.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">\u2018Insufficient fact checks\u2019<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">The ones, who got themselves in a real bind as a result of the award-winning blogger being exposed as a hoaxer, were the German media and some other Western outlets. It was soon revealed that Hingst didn\u2019t stop at making up her family history and went even further by creating some fictional stories about her own life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">Over the years, reputable German media outlets were more than eager to publish stories about the woman, who, according to her own words, <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #ccffff; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.deutschlandfunknova.de\/beitrag\/sexualitaet-soll-doch-eigentlich-spass-machen\">established<\/a><\/strong><\/span> a clinic in the New Delhi slums and helped refugees coming to Germany integrate by launching sex education <strong><a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.zeit.de\/zeit-magazin\/leben\/2017-02\/sexuelle-aufklaerung-fluechtlinge-deutschland\">courses<\/a><\/strong>. Now, as these facts have also been proven untrue, the media has rushed to frantically apologize to their readers and <a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.faz.net\/aktuell\/gesellschaft\/menschen\/deutsche-bloggerin-marie-sophie-hingst-taeuscht-leser-und-medien-15012852.html\">explain<\/a> that they <em>\u201chad no reason to doubt\u201d<\/em> Hingst\u2019s stories back then.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">The German daily Die Zeit went to particularly extraordinary lengths to explain its blunder and <a style=\"color: #ccffff;\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.zeit.de\/glashaus\/2019\/05\/31\/gastbeitrag-2017-taeuschung-verdacht\/\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>published<\/strong><\/span><\/a> a lengthy blog-post, in which it described the numerous ways in which the editors verified Hingst\u2019s claims only to admit that <em>\u201cthe fact-checking before publication and after we received the first hints from our readers was far from sufficient.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ccffff;\">It is not the first time in the last six months that the German media has landed itself in hot water over fake stories. In late 2018, Der Spiegel, which broke the story about Hingst\u2019s hoax, found itself at the center of a major scandal after it was revealed that its reporter, Claas Relotius, who occasionally wrote pieces for other German news outlets as well, was exposed as a fraudster.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rt.com\/news\/460904-german-blogger-award-holocaust-hoax\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another Holocaust hoax exposed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Hidden_and_Revisionist_History"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=189320"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189325,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189320\/revisions\/189325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=189320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=189320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=189320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}