The ‘perfect Aryan’ child
used in Nazi propaganda
was actually Jewish
By Terrence McCoy
The Washington Post
The newlyweds came to Berlin as students, a pair of Latvian Jews who wanted to make it big in singing. In 1934, just after Adolf Hitler took control of Germany, the young Jewish woman became pregnant with a child who would soon become known as the “perfect Aryan.”
The photo was everywhere. It first adorned a Nazi magazine that held a beauty contest to find “the perfect Aryan” and then was later splashed across postcards and storefronts.
Less well-known, however, was the fact that the “Aryan” girl was actually Jewish.
As remarkable as that revelation is, more remarkable is the story that accompanies it. The girl, now 80 and named Hessy Levinsons Taft, recently presented the magazine cover, emblazoned with her baby photo, to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel and offered her tale to the German newspaper Bild. But the extended version of what happened is found in an oral history she gave to the United States Holocaust Museum in 1990.
It begins in 1928 when her parents came to Berlin. Both were singers. The father, Jacob Levinsons, crooned a chocolate-smooth baritone. His wife, Pauline Levinsons, had studied at the renowned Riga Conservatory in Latvia.
Jacob had accepted a position at a local opera house and taken the stage name of Yasha Lenssen, his daughter recalled in the lengthy interview with the Holocaust Museum. It was the time of surging anti-Semitism in Berlin, and when “they found out that his name really was Levinsons,” she said, “they decided to cancel his contract.”
“Without any money” and living in a “very, very cramped one-room” apartment, the young couple gave birth to Hessy Levinsons on May 17, 1934. She was beautiful. So when she was 6 months old, the parents decided to have her picture taken. “My mother took me to a photographer,” she told the museum. “One of the best in Berlin! And he did — he made a very beautiful picture — which my parents thought was very beautiful.”
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