Hessy Levinsons Taft

Hessy Levinsons Taft (born May 17, 1934[1]), a German Jew, was featured as an infant in Nazi propaganda after her photo won a contest to find "the most beautiful Aryan baby" in 1935. Taft's image was subsequently distributed widely by the Nazi party in a variety of materials, such as magazines and postcards, to promote Aryanism.

Hessy Levinsons Taft
Hessy Levinsons as featured in Nazi propaganda materials.
Born (1934-05-17) May 17, 1934
Berlin, Germany
OccupationChemistry professor
Known forJewish child whose photo was featured in Nazi Germany as the "Perfect Aryan Baby."
Spouse(s)Earl Taft
Parent(s)Jacob Levinsons
Pauline Levine

Photograph

Taft's parents, Jacob Levinsons and Pauline Levinsons (née Levine),[2] were unaware of their photographer's decision to enter the photograph into the contest until learning that the photo of their daughter had been selected by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as the winner.

Fearing that the Nazis would discover that their family was Jewish, Taft's mother informed the photographer that they were Jewish. The photographer told her mother, Pauline, that he knew they were Jewish and deliberately entered Taft's photograph into the contest because he "wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous".[3] In July 2014 Taft told the German-language newspaper Bild that "I can laugh about it now,[4] "but if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn't be alive."

Later life

In 1938, Jacob Levinsons was briefly arrested by the SS. In the same year, the family immigrated to France and settled in Paris, then later moved to Cuba and from there to the United States in 1949.[4]

Hessy Levinsons studied chemistry at Julia Richman High School in New York, and majored in chemistry at Barnard College,[5] graduating in 1955.[6] As a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia University she met her husband, mathematics instructor Earl Taft. She and her husband joined the faculty at Rutgers University, but she left academia to raise a family, later working on the AP Chemistry exam for the Educational Testing Service.[5] After 30 years at the Educational Testing Service, she returned to New York as a chemistry professor at St. John's University[3][5] in 2000. Her research in this later period of life focused on water sustainability. She retired in 2016.[7]

gollark: And I hear people who take payment from them complain lots although I don't know exactly why.
gollark: They do apparently use their payment processor status for censorious purposes.
gollark: How micro- are their transactions?
gollark: That doesn't really make much sense to me. You would need to spend money to artificially fiddle with the price. More money than you gain from the higher gold prices probably.
gollark: Unfortunately there isn't really good microtransaction infrastructure around yet as far as I know.

See also
  • Werner Goldberg – soldier with partial Jewish ancestry also used in Nazi propaganda
  • Sandra Laing - South African girl reclassified from "White" to "Coloured"

References
  1. "Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 15, 1990. Archived from the original on August 31, 2015. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  2. McCoy, Terrence (July 7, 2014). "The 'perfect Aryan' child used in Nazi propaganda was actually Jewish". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  3. Huggler, Justin (July 1, 2014). "Nazi 'perfect Aryan' poster child was Jewish". The Telegraph. Berlin. Archived from the original on August 31, 2015. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  4. Sidon, Adi (July 1, 2014). "Ich war Hitlers Propaganda-Baby" [I Was Hitler's Propaganda Baby]. Bild (in German). Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  5. Wolf, Lauren K. (September 8, 2014). "Hessy Taft: Jewish survivor and longtime ACS member describes how she was once a Nazi poster child". Chemical & Engineering News. Vol. 92 no. 36. American Chemical Society. p. 30.
  6. Alumnae Biographical Files (PDF), Barnard College Archives, retrieved 2019-07-16
  7. Author biography from Alexandratos, Spiro D.; Barak, Naty; Bauer, Diana; Davidson, F. Todd; Gibney, Brian R.; Hubbard, Susan S.; Taft, Hessy L.; Westerhof, Paul (January 2019). "Sustaining Water Resources: Environmental and Economic Impact". ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. American Chemical Society. 7 (3): 2879–2888. doi:10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b05859.
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