Hitler's 'perfect Aryan' baby, except she was Jewish

The newlyweds came to Berlin to make it big. In 1934, just after Adolf Hitler took control of Germany, the young woman became pregnant with a child who would soon become known as the "perfect Aryan".

The photo was everywhere. It adorned a Nazi magazine that held a contest to find the "perfect" Aryan baby and was later splashed across postcards and shop fronts.

Less well known, however, was the fact that the "Aryan" girl was actually Jewish.

The girl, now 80, is Hessy Levinsons Taft, and she recently presented the magazine cover, emblazoned with her baby photo, to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel and offered her tale to the German newspaper Bild.

But the extended version of what happened is in an oral history she gave to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1990.

It begins in 1928, when her parents came to Berlin. Her father, Jacob Levinsons, crooned in a smooth baritone. His wife, Pauline Levinsons, had studied at the renowned Riga Conservatory in Latvia.

Jacob had accepted a position at a local opera house and taken the stage name of Yasha Lenssen, his daughter told the Holocaust museum. It was the time of surging anti-Semitism in Berlin, and when "they found out that his name really was Levinsons", Levinsons Taft said, "they decided to cancel his contract".