Hessy Levinsons Taft, who as a baby was unwittingly featured on the cover of a Nazi magazine as the so-called “ideal Aryan baby” despite being Jewish, has died at her home in San Francisco. She was 91, according to The New York Times. Her family said she died earlier this month.
Taft’s image appeared on the cover of a German magazine distributed on Jan. 24, 1935, after winning a contest organized by the Nazi propaganda apparatus to find the most beautiful Aryan baby. The photograph was taken by Hans Ballin, a well-known photographer in Berlin, who had been approached by the office of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime’s propaganda chief, to submit images of infants for the competition.
Ballin submitted 10 photographs, including one of Levinsons Taft, whose Jewish parents had taken her to his studio shortly after her birth. The baby won the contest, and her image was later reproduced on congratulatory postcards sold in German shops.
According to Taft and her family, Ballin was aware that the child was Jewish and deliberately submitted the photo as an act of quiet defiance. In a 2014 interview, Taft recalled that her mother confronted the photographer after the publication. “My mother asked him, ‘Don’t you know we are Jewish?’” Taft said. “And he answered, ‘I know, but I wanted to mock them, to make fools of them.’”
After discovering their daughter’s image had been widely circulated, Taft’s parents became fearful of being identified. They avoided taking her outside, and at one point her father was detained by an SS officer before being released. The family fled Germany in 1938 for Paris, but fears followed them there as well.
In 1941, they escaped from France to Cuba, where they lived for several years before settling in the United States.
Taft later studied chemistry at Columbia University and went on to become a professor at Princeton University. She and her husband, Earl Taft, a mathematics professor, had two children.
Throughout her life, she kept three original copies of the Nazi magazine that featured her photograph. “My mother took them when we fled Europe,” she said. “She hid them between pages of sheet music.”
In 2014, Taft visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where she donated an original copy of the magazine bearing her image as part of a national initiative to collect personal artifacts from the Holocaust era. The project ultimately gathered more than 120,000 items.
Asked that year how she felt about being labeled the “most beautiful Aryan baby,” Taft replied, “I feel revenge. I wish I could have said that earlier, when more Nazis were still alive.”