Biography of Hessy Levinsons Taft

Hessy Levinsons Taft, born Hessy Lewinsohn (17 May 1934 in Berlin; died 1 January 2026 in San Francisco), was a German Jewish chemist and university teacher. Her baby photograph was used without her family's knowledge in Nazi propaganda in 1935 as the supposed image of an "Aryan" child. Later she told that story herself and made clear how false and dangerous the racist categories behind the image were.

Berlin

Hessy Lewinsohn was born in Berlin to Jacob and Pauline Lewinsohn. Her parents were Jewish opera singers who had come to Germany from Latvia. When Hessy was a few months old, her mother had a portrait taken by the photographer Hans Ballin. The family first treated the picture as a private keepsake.

The photograph

Ballin submitted the photograph without the parents' consent to a competition seeking a supposed ideal "Aryan" baby. The image appeared on the cover of the magazine Sonne ins Haus and circulated further. When the parents learned what had happened, they feared that their daughter's Jewish identity could be discovered. Ballin later said he had wanted to expose Nazi racial ideology by submitting the picture of a Jewish child.

Flight and later life

The family left Germany in 1938. Their route led through Latvia and France to Cuba, and eventually to the United States. After marriage, Hessy Lewinsohn became Hessy Levinsons Taft. She studied chemistry at Barnard College and biochemistry at Columbia University. Later she taught at St. John's University in New York and was active in the American Chemical Society.

Speaking later

The story of the photograph became public decades later. Taft gave an oral-history interview to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and in 2014 donated a copy of the magazine to Yad Vashem. For her, the episode also carried late satisfaction: an image from the visual language of a murderous ideology became evidence of its absurdity.

San Francisco

Hessy Levinsons Taft died in San Francisco on 1 January 2026. She was 91 years old. Her life connects early danger under antisemitic persecution, the work of a scientist and public testimony about the lie her childhood photograph was once made to carry.