The “perfect Aryan poster baby” was actually Jewish

[repost from my Facebook writer page]

The cover of the January 1935 issue of “Sonne ins Haus” (“sun in the house”, a Nazi magazine for mothers) featured the winner of the “most beautiful Aryan baby” photo contest.

Cover of “Sonne ins Haus”, January 1935

There was only one problem with the undeniably beautiful baby Hessy Levinsons: she was Jewish.
When her mother Pauline had taken Hessy to Hans Ballin’s photography studio for a baby portrait, the photographer had asked her if he could enter said portrait for the “most beautiful Aryan baby” contest. Pauline, flustered, felt obliged to inform the photographer that both parents were non-Aryan. The photographer’s answer: “I know. I want to make the Nazis look lächerlich” [ridiculous].

Recounting the story 80 years later, Hessy Levinsons Taft, now a chemistry professor emeritus at St. John’s University in New York, says she can laugh about it now, but realizes she might not have been alive today if the Nazis had known.

As it happens, following her father arrest and brief imprisonment in 1938, the Levinsons got the message and fled to France. After the Nazi invasion, they made it to Nice in the unoccupied zone (a.k.a., “Vichy France”). In 1941 the husband was able to bribe a Cuban consular official for visas, and with that visa they were presumably able to get a transit visa to Portugal, as they traveled to Lisbon shortly after. In 1942, they were finally able to make it to Havana, where Hessy and her sisetr Naomi attended a British school .
Come 1949, the family relocated one last time to New York City, where Hessy attended a more sciences-oriented high school and immediately was hooked on chemistry. She studied the subject at Columbia and stayed on for her doctorate, during which she met her husband, a mathematics instructor and future professor Earl J. Taft, as in “Taft-Hopf algebra”.)

The exigencies of raising small children made her leave the lab for a while, but she did continue working in science, just on the educational rather than the research side: she oversaw the development of the AP Chemistry test at Educational Testing Services in Princeton, NJ. Later she did return to research, now focusing on water treatment and sustainable water supply. Here is a very recent review article that she co-authored on the subject: http://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b05859

Would an editor chide me for putting this “unrealistic” story in a novel? Possibly, since unlike history, fiction has to make sense. She isn’t the only “Aryan poster boy/girl” used by the Nazis who was Jewish in whole or in part, BTW: Werner Goldberg, the “Ideal Wehrmacht Soldier” whose picture was used for recruiting posters, had a Jewish father. [I will cover his story in a future post.]

Let’s raise a glass wishing Hessy many more healthy and fulfilling years. Ad meah ve’esrim!

[For further reading: http://www.bild.de/regional/berlin/adolf-hitler/berliner-juedin-hessy-taft-war-hitlers-propaganda-baby-36611794.bild.html (in German) and https://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i36/Hessy-Taft.html (in English) If you do not read German fluently, check out the amazing Deep Learning-based machine translator DeepL]

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! An alert commenter there points out that “Sonne ins Haus” predates the Third Reich and wasn’t originally a Nazi periodical — merely Gleichgeschaltet [literally: “switched in line”, idiomatically: “made to conform”] after the National Socialist takeover.

I was unable to find any online pre-1933 issues, but it seems the owner of the publishing house was a Leipzig-based entrepreneur named Kurt Herrmann (German wikipedia page). Summarizing in translation, Herrmann was a close friend of Hermann Göring [y”sh] and even acted as a witness at Göring’s remarriage to Emmy Sonneman. Already wealthy, he leveraged his pull with the Nazi top to enrich himself enough through forced “Aryanizations” — the forced sale of Jewish-owned firms to new “Aryan” owners for a tiny fraction of their value[*] — that he became the richest man in Leipzig. Near the end of the war, her fled to Liechtenstein. His firm was expropriated after the war by the Communist East German regime and Gleichgeschaltet for the second time. Herrmann himself got off lightly in his denazification trial, being classified only as category 4: Mitlaufer (fellow traveler).

[*] One of these plundered firms was the venerable sheet music publisher C. F. Peters, then owned by Henri_Hinrichsen (Hamburg 1868—Auschwitz 1942). After the war, the Communist East German government expropriated the Leipzig firm again and ran it as a state enterprise; Hinrichsen’s sons Max and Walter, who had set up the London and New York branches of the company, recreated the private company in Frankfurt. After German reunification, the company was reunited as well.

Real, not alternate history: the Battle for Castle Itter, the one time when US Army and Wehrmacht fought together against the SS

On May 5, 1945, just three days before VE-Day, Castle Itter[*] in Northern Tyrol became the scene of a most improbable battle. 
Since 1943, this castle had been converted by the SS into a kind-of “VIP prison” for prominent inmates from occupied France. These included two former French PMs (Edouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud); Charles de Gaulle’s sister Marie-Agnès; General Maurice Gamelin and his successor Maxime Weygand; Michel Clémenceau, son of the WW I-era prime minister; former French ambassador to Germany André François-Poncet; and many others. 
The place was administratively an Aussenlager (satellite camp) of Dachau (where another group of “prominents” was held in the main camp itself). A group of lower-status Dachau inmates carried out menial work.
The commander, SS-Hauptsturmführer [i.e., captain] Wimmer, was under orders to shoot the prisoners if capture by the Allies became imminent. He supposedly promised a prisoner delegation he would not implement this order, but the inmates placed no trust in this promise.
The camp electrician, a Yugoslav inmate, was sent out on an errand as a cover to go looking for US troops. He found a reconnaisance patrol nearly 70 km away near Innsbruck. The SS garrison did meanwhile flee, but the prisoners feared a roving SS unit would come to the castle.

The Americans sent a small team (14 men under Lt. “Jack” Lee, including crews of two Sherman tanks, “Besotten Jenny” and “Bochebuster”), which joined up with about 20 Wehrmacht soldiers led by a defector to the Austrian resistance, Major Josef Gangl.
Lee posted “Besotten Jenny” at the castle and “Bochebuster” at the bridge. The meager force’s ranks were swollen by a number of the French prisoners who had taken arms from the armory — and even one wounded SS officer who decided to switch sides. On May 5, the castle came under attack from a force of about 100-150 SS soldiers. The much smaller defending force held the SS at bay for most of May 5, until relieved in the late afternoon by a company of the 142th US Infantry Regiment. Major Gangl was killed by a sniper, but the others managed to survive. Gangl was honored posthumously as an Austrian resistance hero, while Lee got a DSC and a promotion to Captain.[**]

The Swedish power metal band Sabaton [***] often has lyrics based on actual war history and feats of wartime heroism. Their song “The Last Battle” (see below) is a pretty straight-up retelling of the event.  Kudos to the band for introducing many young(er) listeners to bits of war history they are unlikely to learn in school or from books.

The Sabaton song “The Last Battle” commemorates the Battle of Castle Itter

History is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose… (with apologies to JBS Haldane)…

[*] The castle has a musical connection: the female concert pianist and conservatory teacher Sophie Menter (a former pupil of Liszt) owned the place from 1884 until the early 1900s. Tchaikovsky was her guest at the castle and wrote works there.

[**] Mark Felton has a more detailed video here. Felton notes one other situation where a similar Wehrmacnt-US Army ad hoc coalition former against the SS — this time to rescue the precious Lipizzaner horses.

[***] Despite its superficial similarity to the Hebrew word Shabaton (sabbatical), a “sabaton” is the armored shoe or boot of a medieval suit of armor