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An award-winning German historian has been stripped of a national blogging prize after she was found to have made up the stories of 22 Jewish relatives who she said “died in the Holocaust”.

Marie-Sophie Hingst, 31, rose to prominence thanks to her vivid accounts of her grandmother’s family, who she claimed had been killed in Nazi death camps during World War Two.

Her 2013 blog ‘Read on my dear, read on’ attracted almost 250,000 readers and propelled her into the public domain.

She used the platform to tell harrowing tales of her ancestors, describing how her great-grandfather, his wife and four of their daughters were murdered in Auschwitz, leaving only her grandmother to carry on the family line.

Dr Hingst – who obtained a doctorate from Trinity College Dublin – wrote that years of archive research led her to discover their fates, along with 18 other family members who she claimed were also slaughtered in the Nazi genocide.

She went so far as to register their deaths with Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust memorial, and persuaded the organisation to name her “relatives” on its official remembrance lists.

However, an investigation by a fellow academic from Berlin, Gabriele Bergner, revealed 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 didn’t take prisoners from Germany at that time.

Dr Bergner, a genealogical expert, had been suspicious of the elaborate stories, and so she began to pore over Dr Hingst’s family records.

She soon discovered that at least six of the relatives whose deaths had been reported to Yad Vashem apparently did not exist, and that the 31-year-old’s grandmother, Helga Brandl, had been a Christian dentist, married to a Protestant pastor called Rudolf Hingst.

The findings were announced in the German publication Der Spiegel, causing outrage among former admirers of the historian.

Dr Hingst, who studied in Berlin, Lyons, Los Angeles and Dublin, had enjoyed years of recognition and acclaim before her fall from grace.

The 31-year-old frequently spoke on behalf of Holocaust victims’ relatives and chaired a number of events held by the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, according to German media.

In 2017, she was named “blogger of the year” at Germany’s Golden Blogger awards.

The award was withdrawn on Monday, her website was taken down and her ostensibly false accounts have been reported to Yad Vashem.

Her lawyer told Der Spiegel that the historian's work was “literature, not journalism or history” and that she “claimed a great degree of artistic freedom”.

He added that the author had not at any point “spread untruths about her own family history in the framework of texts with real biographical data”.

He stressed that she had written the blog entries not for the sake of fame, but to “combat severe depression.”