Hessy Taft: The Perfect Nazi Baby Was Actually A Jew
THIS is the most lovely story about a prank that was played upon the Nazis back in the 1930s. They had a countrywide competition to find which baby was the most perfect example of the Aryan race, you know, those with the right blood that were going to inherit the continent. All a bit creepy of course but then that’s the sort of thing that they used to do.
So, they have this competition and Goebbels himself picked out the final winner. Who was, in fact, a Jew, although no one told anyone that at the time. Fortunately she survived the war and the Holocaust and has now been able to reveal all to the world:
When Hessy Taft was six months old, she was a poster child for the Nazis. Her photograph was chosen as the image of the ideal Aryan baby, and distributed in party propaganda. But what the Nazis didn’t know was that their perfect baby was really Jewish.
“I can laugh about it now,” the 80-year-old Professor Taft told Germany’s Bild newspaper in an interview. “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.
The photographer who had taken her baby picture entered it into the competition. Her mother wasn’t all that keen which was sensible enough given the dangers. But the photographer was going to only make it public that she was a Jew if she won the competition and thus make the Nazis look rather foolish. Sensibly he was persuaded not to do this once she did win: she wouldn’t be, as she says, alive now if he had. As it was her parents simply couldn’t let her out for several years for fear of her being recognised. But they did survive and now we know about that joke played upon the Nazis.
Posted: 2nd, July 2014 | In: Reviews, Strange But True Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
