Propaganda failed at times for even the master purveyors of deceit

As the airwaves are flooded with government propaganda about the homicide of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we are reminded that sometimes propaganda backfired on even the master purveyors of deceit. 

Hessy Levinsons Taft, who as an infant appeared on the cover of a Nazi magazine in Germany promoting her as the ideal Aryan baby, a distinction complicated by the fact that she was Jewish and had been exploited as part of a dangerous hoax, died on Jan. 1 at her home in San Francisco. She was 91.

Her death was confirmed by her family, reported The New York Times.

Terrifying at first, the story eventually became a source of pride for Mrs. Taft and her parents for the way it neatly illustrated the absurd pseudoscience underlying Adolf Hitler’s racial ideology.

“I feel a sense of revenge,” she said much later. “Good revenge.”

The episode began in 1934, when Hessy was 6 months old and her parents, Latvian opera singers living in Berlin, hired the well-known photographer Hans Ballin to take her portrait.

After framing the photo, her parents displayed it on their piano. One day, the woman who cleaned their home noticed it and told Hessy’s mother that she had seen her daughter on the cover of a magazine.

“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,’” Mrs. Taft said in an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1990.

The woman insisted that it was the same baby. “Just give me some money,” she said, “and I’ll get you the magazine.”

Soon she returned with a copy of Sonne ins Haus, or Sun in the Home, one of several pro-Nazi magazines that were allowed to circulate in the country after Hitler had shut down thousands of other publications. And there, on the cover, was the portrait from the piano.

Hessy’s mother flipped through the pages.

“On the inside of the magazine were pictures of the army with men wearing swastikas,” Mrs. Taft told the Holocaust museum. “My parents were horrified.”

Her mother went to Mr. Ballin’s studio and showed him the magazine. “What is this?” she said. “How did this happen?”

He told her that the Nazis had invited him to submit photos for a contest to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race, and Hessy was among those he included in his submission. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.

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