Jewish Woman Featured on Cover of Pro-Nazi Magazine as a Baby Dies at 91

A Jewish woman who was featured on the cover of a pro-Nazi magazine in Germany as a baby and promoted as the ideal German Aryan, despite her Jewish heritage, died at the age of 91.

The family of Hessy Levinsons Taft confirmed that she died on Jan. 1 at her home in San Francisco, The New York Times reported. She was born on May 17, 1934, in Berlin, Germany, to parents originally from Latvia who were opera singers. In 1935, her photo was printed on the cover of the pro-Nazi family magazine “Sonne ins Haus” (“Sunshine in the House”). The picture was then featured in every newsstand in Germany and used in storefront windows, Nazi advertisements for baby clothing, on postcards, and framed on the walls in people’s homes.

“When I was about six months old, my parents decided that I should have a photograph taken of me; and my mother took me to a photographer,” she told the US Holocaust Memorial Museum during an interview in 1990. “He made a beautiful picture — which my parents had framed and put on the piano that my father gave my mother as a present when I was born. One day, the lady who came to help my mother clean the apartment, Frau Klauke, said to my mother, ‘You know, I saw Hessy on a magazine cover in town.'”

The housekeeper showed a copy of the Nazi magazine with the reprinted image of Taft on the cover, and her parents were horrified. Taft’s mother confronted the photographer, Hans Ballin, and he admitted that he was asked to submit 10 pictures for a beauty competition run by the Nazi propaganda department, led by Joseph Goebbels. The contest was to find a baby that best represents the ideal German Aryan race, in an effort to further promote the Nazi ideology. The photographer submitted Taft’s photo, knowing that she was Jewish, but without asking the family’s permission. She recalled the conversation her parents had with the photographer about his selection:

“My parents say he said, in German, ‘I wanted to allow myself the pleasure of this joke.’ And then he told my mother, ‘And you see, I was right. Of all the babies, they picked this baby as the perfect Aryan,'” she remembered. “My parents were both shocked by the possible consequences that this could bring and amazed at the irony of it all. But they felt at this moment that it was best to keep it quiet.”

According to Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust, Taft was once asked what she would tell the photographer who submitted her picture in the beauty contest and she responded, “I would tell him, good for you for having the courage.”

“I feel a sense of revenge, good revenge,” she added, about being a poster child for Nazi propaganda.

Taft and her family fled Germany for Paris in 1938. They then escaped Nazi-occupied France in 1941 and traveled through Spain and Portugal before setting sail to Cuba. In 1949, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York. Taft’s immediate family survived the Holocaust but most of her extended family members in Latvia were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, according to Yad Vashem.

Taft studied chemistry and received degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University. She worked at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, where she oversaw Advanced Placement exams in chemistry, and was an adjunct chemistry professor at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. In 1959, she married Earl Taft, and together they had two children, Nina and Alex. Her husband died in 2021. She is survived by her sister Noemi Pollack, two children, and four grandchildren.