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

[Behind the Aegis]

Hessy Levinsons Taft on the cover of the pro-Nazi magazine family magazine “Sonne ins Haus” printed in 1935. Photo: Screenshot/US Holocaust Memorial Museum

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:

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[Biophilic]

1. What an interesting story.