Revealed: ‘Ideal Aryan’ Nazi Poster Child Was Jewish
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by Dave Bender
Hessy Taft as Nazi 'Aryan poster child'
Oh, the poetic justice.
Almost 80 years later, turns out the “perfect Aryan baby” exploited by Nazi propaganda to illustrate the “master race,” was Jewish.
In 1935, at the age of six months, Hessy Taft’s mother brought her to a top Berlin photographer, who — unknown to her family — submitted her image to a Nazi competition, according to the UK’s Daily Mail.
The image, shot by Hans Ballin, appeared on magazine covers and postcards, according to the newspaper.
“I can laugh about it now,” Taft told Germany’s Bild. “But if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive.”
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels himself chose her as the winning entrant, according to The Telegraph.
Only by chance did her mother, Pauline Levinsons, months later spot her daughter’s face adorning the magazine cover.
In the final ironic twist, Prof. Taft, who now teaches chemistry in New York, recently submitted the image to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
