Jewish Calif. woman who was face of Nazi propaganda outlives the lie, dies at 91: ‘I feel a sense of revenge’

A Jewish woman, whose baby photo was used as Nazi propaganda after winning a contest to represent the Aryan race, died at her San Francisco home on Jan. 1 — she was 91.

Hessy Levinsons Taft, born in Berlin in 1934 to Latvian Jewish parents, was six months old when a German photographer, Hans Ballin, took her photo.

Ballin later entered her photo in a national contest led by the Nazi propaganda minister to find the ideal Aryan baby, without the family’s knowledge.

After Taft won, her image appeared on the cover of the Nazi magazine Sonne ins Haus. When Taft’s parents confronted Ballin, he told them he had “deliberately wanted to slip in the little Jewess” as a joke.

In 2014, after donating a copy of Sonne ins Haus to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Taft told the organization, “I feel a sense of revenge, good revenge.”