World
The Jewish woman selected by Goebbels as the ‘perfect Aryan baby’
Hessy Levinsons Taft, whose photograph appeared without her parents’ knowledge in a Nazi propaganda magazine, has died aged 91
January 12, 2026 12:42
Hessy Levinsons Taft, whose photograph appeared without her parents’ knowledge in a Nazi propaganda magazine, has died aged 91
January 12, 2026 12:42Hessy Levinsons Taft, the Jewish woman heralded as the ideal Aryan baby on a 1935 edition of a major pro-Nazi magazine, has died aged 91.
Born Hessy Lewinssohn in 1934 to opera singers Jacob and Pauline, Levinson Taft’s picture was submitted without her family’s knowledge by photographer Hans Ballin to a magazine competition seeking the ‘perfect Aryan baby’.
It was the Lewinssohns’ cleaner who recognised Hessy’s picture on the cover of the 24 January edition of Sonne ins Haus (Sun in the House). Upon her mother’s frantic attempts to confront him, Ballin explained that he and ten other photographers had been under instructions from the magazine’s editors to submit ten pictures of ‘Aryan’ infants, from which one would be selected by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as the ‘model’ child.
Ballin was aware of the irony of submitting ‘the little Jewess’: “I wanted to give myself the pleasure of this joke and, you see, I was right,” he was later reported to have told the family. The picture soon exploded in popularity, adorning advertisements and the walls of family homes. Its origins were never revealed.
The Lewinssohns had arrived in Berlin from Liepaja, Latvia in the 1920s, with a musical vocation. Jacob changed their surname to ‘Levinsons’ and appeared in nineteen operas under the Germanised stage name Yasha Lenssen. The discovery of his Jewish surname later led to the cancellation of his contract.
In her essay, Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember, published in 1987 after having settled in America, Hessy described her childhood in “the midst of the Hitler era”. Having left the opera, her father worked as a Latvian translator for German businessmen and secured his family a “nice apartment on Augsburger Strasse”.
She also recalled constant anxiety over the family’s Jewish identity, which was already present in the public eye. Her mother feared being seen in public with her young daughter, while most of their relatives were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The family accountant in Germany was affiliated with the Nazi Party, though it was he who later rescued Jacob from Gestapo arrest by insisting on his support for the regime.
Eventually, the family moved to Paris until the German occupation of 1940 forced them to flee for America. Granted visas to Cuba after US authorities rejected their entry, Hessy and her sister attended a “rather strict” British school in Havana, before settling in New York in 1949.
With Germany far behind, Hessy studied for a master’s degree in biochemistry at Columbia University, worked in Princeton education centres, and taught chemistry at St John’s University back in New York.
She married Earl Taft, a mathematics professor renowned for the Taft algebra theory, in the 1950s, and they remained together until his death in 2021. She is survived by her two children, Nina and Alexander.
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