When she was six months old, Hessy was taken to a leading Berlin photographer to have her portrait taken. “But if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive.” 
 
 Prof Taft recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby photograph on the front cover, and told the story of how she became an unlikely poster child for the Third Reich. Hessy Levinsons (now Hessy Levinsons Taft) is the older daughter of Jacob and Pauline (Levine) Levinsons, both talented singers who came from Latvia to Berlin in the 1920s and studied voice at the Hochscule fuer Musik. As Taft, a professor, recalls, her mother took her to a well-known photographer in Berlin in 1935 to have her baby picture taken and was horrified to see Hessy's image on the magazine's cover months later. Frightened by the possible consequences of their exposure as foreign-born Jews, Hessy's mother rushed to the photographer. He explained that he had known she was a Jewish child and had deliberately submitted her photograph to a contest for the most beautiful Aryan baby in order to ridicule Nazi racial theory, and Hessy was selected as winner of the contest among all the German babies. Hessy Taft looks through the photographs of her as a child, which were used for Nazi posters (Ohad Zwigenberg, Yedioth Ahoronot) 
 
 “I wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous,” the photographer told her. He succeeded: the picture won the contest, and was believed to have been chosen personally by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. After the publication of her photograph Hessy was kept largely at home lest she be recognized in the street and her parents questioned about her identity. Several months later an aunt in Memel recognized Hessy's portrait on a picture postcard in a local store and sent it to the Levinsons in Berlin. Even though relatives in Memel, now in Lithuania, saw the photograph, the Nazis apparently never discovered the true identity of their perfect Aryan baby. In 1938, her father was arrested by the Gestapo on a trumped up tax charge, but released when his accountant, a Nazi party member, came to his defence. The Levinsons family fled Germany after the father was temporarily jailed – and released with the help of his Nazi accountant – in 1938, heading for Paris. With the help of the French resistance, they escaped again, this time to Cuba, and in 1949 the family moved to the United States. Today the Jewish woman who was once a Nazi poster child is a professor of chemistry in New York. “I feel a little revenge,” The Telegraph quoted her as saying on the occasion of presenting her photograph to Yad Vashem. “Something like satisfaction.”
– It turns out the Nazis' vision of the ideal Aryan baby—one that was slapped on the cover of a magazine, on postcards, and disseminated in party propaganda—was a Jewish baby. The Telegraph resurfaces the remarkable story of Hessy Taft (born Hessy Levinsons), a now 80-year-old who in 1935, at just six months, was taken by her mother to a Berlin photographer to have her baby photo taken. Months later, Pauline Levinsons spied her daughter's photo on the cover of the Nazi magazine Sonne ins Hause. Worried their Jewish identity would surface as a result, she hurried back to Hans Ballin, who explained to her that he "wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous"—and so the photographer intentionally entered the young Hessy into a contest looking for the most beautiful Aryan baby, one thought to be judged by Joseph Goebbels himself. The truth of the baby's identity never came to light, though Hessy was kept out of public sight by her parents, who feared she'd be recognized. A short time later the family fled Germany for Latvia, then Paris, Cuba, and finally the United States. Haaretz points out that Taft's story isn't an untold one: In fact, it's published on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website. But it's getting a fresh look after Taft recently gave Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial a copy of the magazine cover. "I feel a little revenge," the Telegraph quotes her as saying. "Something like satisfaction." (In other Nazi news: Was Hitler a billionaire tax dodger?)