The PERFECT Aryan is physically Jewish!  

Hessy Taft recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel with a 

Nazi magazine featuring her baby photograph on the front cover, and told the 

story of how she became an unlikely poster child for the Third Reich.

When Hessy Taft was six months old, she was a poster child for the Nazis. Her 

photograph was chosen as the image of the ideal Aryan baby, and distributed in 

party propaganda. But what the Nazis didn’t know was that their perfect baby 

was really Jewish.

“I can laugh about it now,” the 80-year-old Professor Taft told Germany ’s Bild 

newspaper in an interview. “But if the Nazis had known who I really was, I 

wouldn’t be alive.”

Prof Taft recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel with a 

Nazi magazine featuring her baby photograph on the front cover, and told the 

story of how she became an unlikely poster child for the Third Reich.

Her parents, Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, both talented singers, moved to Berlin  

from Latvia to pursue careers in classical music in 1928, only to find 

themselves caught up in the Nazis’ rise to power. Her father lost his job at an opera company

because he was Jewish, and had to find work as a door-to-door salesman.

In 1935, with the city rife with anti-semitic attacks, Pauline Levinsons took her 

six-month-old daughter Hessy to a well-known Berlin photographer to have her 

baby photograph taken.

A few months later, she was horrified to find her daughter’s picture on the 

front cover of Sonne ins Hause, a major Nazi family magazine.

Terrified, the family would be exposed as Jews, she rushed to the photographer, Hans

Ballin. He told her he knew the family was Jewish, and had deliberately 

submitted the photograph to a contest to find the most beautiful Aryan 

baby.

 “I wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous,” the photographer told her.

He succeeded: the picture won the contest, and was believed to have been chosen 

personally by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Frightened she would be recognised on the streets and questions asked about her identity, 

Prof Taft’s parents kept her at home. Her photograph appeared on widely available Nazi postcards,

where she was recognized by an aunt in distant Memel, now part of Lithuania . But the Nazis

never discovered Prof Taft’s true identity. In 1938, her father was arrested by the Gestapo on a

trumped up tax charge, but released when his accountant, a Nazi party member, came to his

defense.

After that, the family fled Germany . They moved first to Latvia , before settling in 

Paris only for the city to fall to the Nazis. With the help of the French resistance, they escaped again,

this time to Cuba , and in 1949 the family moved to the United States .

Today the Jewish woman who was once a Nazi poster child is a professor of chemistry 

in New York .

“I feel a little revenge,” she said of presenting her photograph to Yad Vashem. 

 

“Something like satisfaction.”