Hessy Levinsons Taft, the Jewish woman whose baby photograph was promoted in Nazi Germany as an exemplar of the “Aryan” child, has died aged 91. She died on 1 January at her home in San Francisco.
Her story began in Berlin in late 1934, when she was about six months old. Her parents, Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, Latvian-born Jewish opera singers then living in Germany, commissioned a portrait photograph from a studio run by Hans Ballin, a well-known Berlin photographer.
The family displayed the portrait at home. Weeks later, their cleaner told them she had seen the infant’s face on a magazine cover. The edition was the 24 January 1935 issue of Sonne ins Haus (“Sun in the House”), described as a pro-Nazi family magazine. Alongside the baby’s image were articles praising Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
The child’s parents had not authorised publication. When they confronted Ballin, he explained that the photograph had been submitted to a contest organised for propaganda purposes to select the “perfect Aryan baby”. In accounts given by Taft in later life, Ballin told her mother that he had knowingly entered a Jewish baby as a “joke”. Reuters reported Taft recalling Ballin’s words: “I wanted to allow myself the pleasure of this joke.”
The contest required multiple photographers to submit infant portraits; in Taft’s case, the image was ultimately chosen by Joseph Goebbels, the regime’s propaganda minister. The photograph was then reproduced widely, including in magazines, postcards and shop displays advertising children’s clothes. Reuters reported one placard urging customers to “buy beautiful clothes for your beautiful baby.”
For the family, publicity brought risk. Taft later said her parents feared that if the authorities discovered the child on the cover was Jewish, the consequences would be severe. Reuters reported that she was largely kept indoors for months to reduce the chance of recognition.
The Levinsons’ status as Latvian nationals initially offered some protection from measures directed at German Jews, but the family decided to leave as Nazi power consolidated. Later accounts place them in Paris by the late 1930s and, after the fall of France in 1940, in the south of the country.
An oral-history extract published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) describes the family’s attempts to emigrate. It states that they obtained a United States visa in 1941 but could not leave within the required time; an extension request was refused. In 1942 they obtained visas for Cuba and settled there before moving to the United States in 1949.
Taft’s later life was spent in education and science. The Times reported that she studied at Barnard College and earned a master’s degree in biochemistry at Columbia University. She later taught chemistry at St John’s University in New York.
She married Earl Taft, a mathematics professor, in 1959. The Times reported that he died in 2021 and that she is survived by their two children.
For decades, the family kept copies of the 1935 magazine and rarely discussed the circumstances of its publication. Taft began speaking publicly about it later in life. The Times of Israel reported that she first set out the story in 1987 in Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember, edited by Gertrude Schneider, and that she later provided recorded testimony.
The magazine itself became an artefact of the episode. Reuters reported that in 2014 she donated an original copy of Sonne ins Haus to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. She also donated a copy to the USHMM, while a third remained with her family.
