One of the most common stories of recent years that has been used to attack National Socialism as well as racial science in general – despite the fact that it is true that jews are all intents and purposes a separate human biological group (aka a racial group) according to biologists and geneticists – (1) is the story of Hessy Levinson Taft and how she was photographed as a baby then had her photograph published in a illustrated family magazine called ‘Sonne ins Haus’ in 1935 while being cited as the ‘perfect Aryan baby’.
This story has been widely repeated with all sorts of variations – often claiming explicitly or by implication that Goebbels himself picked Hessy’s photo out as the ‘perfect Aryan baby’ – (2) and has been repeatedly used as a way to ‘make fun at the idiotic Nazis’ for ‘picking a jewish baby as being more beautiful than an Aryan baby’. (3)
Naturally I was curious to know how true this actually was and – as my friend ‘Zoomer Historian’ once remarked about me – I like investigating these little byways of history because they are often both fun and instructive.
The story of Hessy Levinson Taft being the ‘Perfect Aryan Baby’ however quickly begins to fall apart – it rather reminds of the rather similar claim by an Israeli ‘Holocaust Survivor’ named Yocheved Gold who claims that as a ‘blonde haired, blue eyed perfectly Aryan-looking jewess’ she was selected to present flowers to Hitler himself during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin – (4) when we begin to look into it beyond just accepting it because ‘it sounds good’.
The basic account of what happened is summarised well by Colin Schultz writing for the ‘Smithsonian Magazine’ in July 2014 when he described how:
‘One day, the lady who came to clean…help my mother clean our apartment, Frau Klauke, said to my mother, “You know, I saw Hessy on a magazine cover in town.” And my mother thought surely she must be mistaken, that there are many babies that look alike, and just told her, “Well, that couldn’t be [the] case.” Uh, the lady insisted; and she says, “No, no, no, no. It’s definitely Hessy. It’s this picture. And…and just give me some money, and I’ll get you the magazine.” And so my mother did. And sure enough, this lady came back with a magazine, the front cover which said, “Sonne ins Haus” — which in German means, “the Sun in the Home.” And there was the picture on the piano reproduced on the front cover of this magazine.
This magazine was published out of Leipzig, and very definitely one of the few magazines allowed to circulate in Germany at the time, because it was a Nazi magazine. On the inside of the magazine were pictures of the Army with men wearing swastikas. There’s a picture of the Führer himself reviewing the troops. There were pictures of the Hitlerjugend, and uh several of their activities, both in marching and in campfires and all other activities. It was a family magazine.
My parents were horrified. They didn’t know quite how this came about; except that my mother, naturally, rushed over to the photographer. She said to him, “What is this? How did this happen?” And the photographer quickly sort of closed the door, pulled the blinds, and told her to…very quietly admonished her to keep quiet. And he says, “Shhh…I will tell you the following. I was asked to submit the…my ten best pictures for a beauty contest run by the Nazis. So were ten other outstanding photographers in Germany. So, ten photographers submitted their ten best pictures. And I sent in your baby’s picture.”
And my mother said, “But you knew that this is a Jewish child.” And the photographer said, “Yes.” And this is a quote that I have always…My parents say he said, in German, “Ich wollte mir den Spass erlauben”–”I wanted to allow myself the pleasure of this joke.” And then he told my mother, “And you see, I was right. Of all the babies, they picked this baby as the perfect Aryan.”’ (5)
A similar account is provided by ‘Yad Vashem’ who also provided the alleged photographer’s name (Hans Ballin) but in Hessy’s original ‘Holocaust’ oral history video testimony from 1990 she doesn’t know his name and just refers to him as ‘the photographer’ (suggesting this has been surmised and added somewhere along the line by someone who is probably not Hessy herself):
‘In 1935, Hessy’s mother and aunt took six-month-old Hessy to be photographed in a professional studio by Hans Ballin, a well-known German photographer in Berlin. Seven months later the Levinson family housekeeper told Polin that she saw Hessy’s picture on the cover of a popular Nazi family magazine “Sonne ins Haus” (Sunshine in the House). The photograph had been selected in a contest from an assortment of a hundred pictures of babies in Germany by ten well-known German photographers. The contest had been arranged by the Nazi propaganda department headed by Joseph Goebbels in which entries for the winning picture would depict the ideal beautiful German Aryan baby that would appear on the cover of the magazine.
It turned out that the photographer, unbeknownst to the Levinson family, along with his submission of 10 other pictures, had thrown in Hessy’s baby photo as well which ended up winning the contest. The irony of the fact that a Jewish baby had won a Nazi propaganda contest designed to showcase the ideal Aryan child set up by the office of Goebbels was not lost on Hessy’s mother who later said: “I wanted to allow myself the pleasure of the joke.” Hessy’s photo was also later redistributed on postcards throughout Germany and even made it as far as present day Lithuania.’ (6)
Now the first question that should have been answered before any of the above was ever written is the simplest: what is the source for this narrative?
In addition to: what independent evidence do we have to support this?
The first thing I checked was to see if Bryan Rigg had mentioned Hessy’s claim in his 2002 study of the complications of German racial theory in practice ‘Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers’ that covers the similar and even more famous case of the half-jewish soldier Werner Goldberg; who was accidentally portrayed as the face of the Aryan soldier of the Wehrmacht in 1939 – again there are many myths about Goldberg’s case that I will clear up in a separate article – (7) but Rigg doesn’t mention Hessy’s case. Not that I was surprised per se but had Rigg been aware of it; it would have been the obvious comparison to Goldberg to make even if it was a little out of his way.
However, had Rigg looked into Hessy’s case then I think he’d have been struck – as I was after I started looking into it – how little evidence there is behind this claim. Sure, Hessy appears to have been in the Third Reich at the right time, and I am sure the rest of her biographical details are correct such as how her parents with jews from Latvia – sometimes stated to be Lithuania – and how they subsequently left Germany for France in 1938 (or left Germany for Latvia in 1937 then Latvia for France in 1938 [again depends who you read and believe]) and then immigrated to the United States in 1941. (8)
The problem comes when we ask what the source of these claims is.
That source is… well… Hessy Levinson Taft herself who was interviewed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 1990 about ‘what happened’ and her oral history interview is now happily available on YouTube. (9)
This should immediately have rang all sorts of alarm bells in the head of any half-way competent historian or journalist, because it is a single source anecdotal claim that has suddenly been made over fifty years after the events it purports to describe and is made by a person who – while the subject of the claims – was less than a year old at the time and would not have been able to remember what occurred. Thus, at best what Hessy is claiming is second-hand reportage – she implies/states in her USHMM interview multiple times that her information on these events comes from her mother and father – not her own experiences and she would likely have become aware of such claims after she had come of age in the years after the end of the Second World War.
Yet it did not and Hessy story has been uncritically repeated ‘as absolutely true’ since the 1990s but especially so after it was picked up and reported on by several major publications like ‘The Tablet’, the ‘Daily Telegraph’ and the ‘Smithsonian Magazine’ in mid-2014.
No one has asked the obvious questions of Hessy nor looked for the obvious confirmatory evidence. To my knowledge Hessy has never reproduced the original photo of herself that she claims the ‘Sonne ins Haus’ front cover is a reproduction of let alone proven that that photo is of her and no one else.
This is the basic criteria to prove the claim she is making, but this has not been done.
Indeed, the likely reason for this is fairly simple: Hessy is lying and/or repeating a family story she cannot prove to be true with any kind of evidence.
We can see that she is the very least doing this purely for attention given how many different photos there are of her with her alleged ‘baby photo’ and how it became her ‘claim to fame’ (and in essence her identity) in later life.
For example: (10)
And: (11)
The point is fairly simple: there is no evidence whatsoever that the child on the front cover of the illustrated family magazine ‘Sonne ins Haus’ from 1935 is Hessy Levinson Taft and this claim only dates to 1990 with the only source of the claim being Hessy herself and no confirmatory evidence has – to my knowledge – been provided thus until this is provided Hessy’s claim to be the ‘baby in the photo’ must be categorically rejected as false because there is no evidence that her claim is actually true.
It is that simple.
References
(1) On this for example see: John Baker, 1974, ‘Race’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 232-247
(2) For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/world/europe/hessy-levinsons-taft-dead.html
(3) For example: https://www.holocaustchronicle.org/staticpages/91.html; https://hyperallergic.com/how-one-photographer-made-the-nazis-look-ridiculous/
(4) On Gold’s story and why it is almost certainly a later fabrication by her see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/fake-holocaust-survivors-yocheved
(5) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-one-1930s-german-photographer-successfully-trolled-nazi-party-180951987/
(6) https://www.yadvashem.org/blog/jewish-girl-was-poster-baby-in-nazi-propaganda.html
(7) If interested see Bryan Rigg, 2002, ‘Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish descent in the German Military’, 1st Edition, University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, pp. 141-142
(8) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-one-1930s-german-photographer-successfully-trolled-nazi-party-180951987/
(9) https://www.youtu be.com/watch?v=wh1ujFYuSGc
(10) https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/jewish-woman-featured-as-nazis-ideal-aryan-baby-recalls-ordeal-idUSKBN0FE2EN/
(11) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10938062/Nazi-perfect-Aryan-poster-child-was-Jewish.html
Karl’s SubstackRead More
R1
T1
