Age, Biography, and Wiki
Marie Sophie Hingst was born on October 20, 1987, in Wittenberg, Germany, to a Protestant family. She passed away on July 17, 2019, in Dublin, Ireland. Hingst fabricated much of her background, including a supposed Jewish heritage and experiences related to the Holocaust.
| Occupation | Fraudsters |
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| Date of Birth | 20 October 1987 |
| Age | 37 Years |
| Birth Place | N/A |
| Horoscope | Libra |
| Country | |
| Date of death | 17 July, 2019 |
| Died Place | N/A |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is no public information available on Hingst's height, weight, or body measurements.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Details about Hingst's personal relationships or dating status are not publicly documented.
Hingst had no Jewish ancestry on either side of her family. She claimed her mother was a French-Israeli Médecins Sans Frontières worker who committed suicide when Hingst was 16, and that her non-Jewish birth mother was her stepmother. She additionally constructed a Jewish background for her paternal grandparents, describing them as Holocaust survivors whose parents perished in the genocide. Hingst reported 22 relatives who had allegedly died in the Holocaust to Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial; most of these people were later determined to have never existed, and the remainder to not have been from a Jewish background or not to be Holocaust victims. According to later reports, she constructed this backstory shortly after her move to Dublin.
The contents of Read On, My Dear, Read On detail this supposed family history. Hingst claimed that her paternal grandparents were each the sole survivors of their families; her grandfather was purportedly the youngest of five sons, and her grandmother the youngest of five daughters, both of whom lost their parents and older siblings in the Auschwitz concentration camp. She gave specifics of when many of her relatives had been murdered that contradicted historical dates, such as reporting the deportation of her great-grandfather and his family as occurring in February 1940, when deportations of Jews to Auschwitz only began in March 1942. Hingst's statements were at times inconsistent with each other; her claims about how many relatives were murdered differed between her blog and her Yad Vashem statements. A focus of the blog was her grandmother, whom she presented as a strong-willed woman who rejected "the constraints of Jewish tradition". Hingst's grandmother reportedly ran yearly summer tea parties for fellow Auschwitz survivors in Germany; Hingst, as a child, was said to have arranged invitations for such events and sat in on them to listen to the narratives of the guests.
Weeks after Hingst's death, Scally published an article for The Irish Times on his own interview and interactions with her mother, Cornelia, leading up to her death. Cornelia described her daughter as possessing "many realities, and I only have access to one". Doerry spoke to The Irish Times under the promise his statements would not be published; he instead dictated a one-line statement that "Der Spiegel will not comment on the article and regrets the death". Doerry soon after published "Why I Was Right to Report on Marie Sophie Hingst's Lies" for Der Spiegel, where he analysed Hingst's death and the public reaction and concluded his reporting was necessary to prevent a "mockery" of Holocaust victims.
The coverage of Hingst's life and death raised questions of journalistic ethics. In response to Scally's determination to remain in contact with Hingst's mother after the interview, the German professor of journalism Klaus Meier lauded his ethical commitment but deemed it a level of emotional labour that would not be possible for every case. He also discussed the significant concerns raised by reporting on a mentally vulnerable person. In Hingst's case, Meier and Schneider argued reports were justified in the public interest; Schneider felt that due to the extent of the fraud, it would not have been possible to anonymize the fraudster.
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Net Worth and Salary
Hingst's net worth and salary are not publicly disclosed. However, she gained recognition through awards and publications, including the "Golden Blogger" award in 2017, which she later lost due to the exposure of her fabrications.
Career, Business, and Investments
- Career Highlights: Hingst was a blogger known for her blog "Read on, My Dear, Read On," where she wrote about her supposedly Jewish background and experiences as a German expatriate in Ireland. She was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 but later stripped of this title after her false claims were exposed.
- Fabricated Credentials: She claimed achievements in sex education and founded a hospital in New Delhi, none of which were true.
- Investments: There is no information on business investments or financial ventures.
Social Network
Hingst's social media presence was largely tied to her blog and public persona, both of which were significantly impacted by the revelation of her fraudulent claims.
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. Her winning essay, "Europeans should not abandon a collective identity", was published on their website. In her acceptance speech, she referred to her Jewish family. At various points, she was a panel moderator for meetings of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a member of Trinity College's Jewish Society, and an employee at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. 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. Following the hashtag's popularity, she published a photo-book on the subject with DuMont Buchverlag in March 2019. The book was commercially successful. 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 June 2019, Doerry published "The Historian Who Invented 22 Holocaust Victims", an exposé of Hingst's claims, on Der Spiegel website in German and English. The story presented research that indicated that Hingst had falsified her Jewish background, medical work in India, and sex education outreach to refugees in Germany. The Der Spiegel piece was picked up by other news outlets across the German-speaking countries of Europe; Der Tagesspiegel compared her to Russian-American con artist Anna Delvey. 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.
Other discussions of the case revolved around Der Spiegel own history of fabrication. Claas Relotius had been fired from the publication in 2018 for the falsification of at least fourteen articles; critics accused the magazine of attempting to launder its image. 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. Relotius had himself been the subject of arguments that the perpetrators of such fraud cases are unable to withstand the criticism they receive when uncovered. Christian Vooren, writing for Der Tagesspiegel, compared their situations in his obituary for Hingst; he also felt that the nature of the situation made reporting necessary, but quoted Cornelia Hingst's accusation that Doerry had not "seen the person behind the facts" when writing his exposé.
In response to coverage critical of him, Doerry argued that Scally's presentation of Hingst as in a "catastrophic psychological state" was unrepresentative of his interactions with her. 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. He also noted the eight-day period between the conversation that led to his original story and its publication, and stated that if she had recanted or apologised during that period, the article would not have been published "in the form it was". Doerry argued that his reports were morally necessary to avoid "provid[ing] Holocaust deniers with ammunition", and criticised commentators who implied the death of his grandmother Lilli Jahn in the Holocaust rendered him "oversensitive" regarding the subject matter.
In the years following her outing and death, the identity politics element of Hingst's case kept her prominent in discussions of high-profile fraudsters. 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. The latter gave name to the Wilkomirski syndrome, of which Hingst has been discussed as an example. Commentators referred to the sociocultural appeal of situations like Hingst's as being a desire to "unmask" a con artist and discover the underlying desire driving such claims. The nature of such cases has inspired discussion of the nature of identity itself and the degree to which fraud, obvious or subtle, plays a role in many politically oriented identities.
Education
Details about Hingst's educational background are not extensively documented, but she presented herself as a historian and writer.
Marie Sophie Hingst's story serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of fabricating one's identity and achievements for personal gain. Her legacy is marked by controversy rather than legitimate contributions to history or blogging. Given her passing and the absence of active professional endeavors, discussing her net worth in 2025 is not applicable.
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, 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.
She grew up in a university-educated family from a Protestant Christian background; her grandfather was a pastor. After graduating from the Liborius-Gymnasium in Dessau, Hingst studied history at university in Berlin, Lyon, Los Angeles, and eventually Dublin, where she moved in 2013. She attended Trinity College Dublin, where she completed a Ph.D.; from 2015 to 2017, she was a fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. In 2013, she founded the blog Read On, My Dear, Read On, where she wrote about her life as a German expatriate in Ireland and her purported Jewish background and identity. Hingst was awarded "Blogger of the Year" in 2017 by Die Goldenen Blogger (The Golden Bloggers), and Der Tagesspiegel reported in June 2019 that Read On, My Dear, Read On had 240,000 "regular readers".
Hingst additionally fabricated several life accomplishments. She stated on her blog that in 2007, at the age of 19, she had founded a hospital in New Delhi that provided sex education. This purported accomplishment led to her writing for Die Zeit about her experiences, under the pseudonym Sophie Roznblatt. Her purported experiences providing sex education included working at a doctor's office in Wittenberg, where she specialized in responding to anonymous sexual education questions from refugees.
Hingst took down her blog and retained legal counsel, who made a statement to the press that Read On, My Dear, Read On "claimed a significant degree of artistic freedom". In a statement to Trinity's student newspaper The University Times, she "strongly den[ied] all accusations" by Der Spiegel and said she had "never falsified anything". Die Zeit retracted her article; other organizations that had granted her platforms, such as Südwestrundfunk and Deutschlandfunk Nova, similarly retracted support for her. She was stripped of her Goldenen Blogger prize. A German Wikipedia article was created, describing Hingst as a "blogger and fraudster".
The difference between the Irish and German coverage of Hingst's fraud and death attracted media attention across Europe. Jennifer McShane, writing for the Irish IMAGE Magazine, criticised Der Spiegel for apparently failing to recognize Hingst's mental distress while describing Scally's piece for The Irish Times as "compassionate and moving". Avner Ofrath, a scholar of Mediterranean Jewish history at the University of Bremen, wrote about Hingst for the Switzerland-based European Journalism Observatory. He highlighted the enormity of Hingst's fraud, criticising Anglophone writers who attacked the severity of the German coverage for not realizing how offensive many German commentators found her claims. 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". Annika Schneider of Deutschlandfunk summarized the different Irish and German perspectives on the case as the German media focusing on how Hingst's fraud should have been stopped, while the Irish media focused on her as a person and the intensity of her psychological distress.
