Marie-Sophie Hingst claimed on her popular blog that most of her family were killed by the Nazis

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