A Jewish woman whose baby photo was used as Nazi propaganda after winning a contest to represent the Aryan race died at her San Francisco home on Jan. 1 at the age of 91.
Hessy Levinsons Taft, born in Berlin in 1934 to Latvian Jewish parents, was 6 months old when German photographer Hans Ballin took her picture.
Jewish Hessy Taft poses holding a photograph of herself taken in 1935 by German photographer Hans Ballin in 1935. REUTERSWithout the family’s knowledge, Ballin later entered her photo in a national contest led by the Nazi propaganda minister to find the ideal Aryan baby.
After the photo of Taft won the contest, her image appeared on the cover of the Nazi magazine Sonne ins Haus (“Sunshine in the House”). When Taft’s parents confronted Ballin, he told them he had “deliberately wanted to slip in the little Jewess” as a joke.
The front page of the Nazi propaganda family magazine Sonne ins Hous shows Jewish baby Hessy Taft as the ideal German Aryan baby. AFP via Getty Images
In 2014, after donating a copy of Sonne ins Haus to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Taft told the organization: “I feel a sense of revenge, good revenge.”
While her immediate family survived the Holocaust, most of her extended family in Latvia was murdered by the Nazis.
A Nazi nurse with German children. Nazi scientists tried to lighten their hair and eyes to a more Aryan appearance. Universal Images Group via Getty ImagesTaft’s family fled Germany for Paris in 1938, then escaped in 1941 before finding refuge in Cuba.
By 1949, they had made their way to the United States, where Taft pursued her studies at Barnard College and later earned a master’s degree in biochemistry from Columbia University.
Soon after, Taft married Earl Taft, with whom she had two children while working as a professor at St. John’s University.
She first shared the story behind the photo in 1987 for the book “Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember,” by Gertrude Schneider.
