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 hoax, died on Jan. 1 at her home in San Francisco. She was 91.

Th episode began in 1934, when Hessy was 6 months old and her parents hired a photographer to take her portrait. Her parents framed the photo and placed it on their piano. One day, a cleaning woman noticed it, and said she had seen the photo on the cover of a magazine. The cleaner purchased a copy of the magazine, a pro-Nazi publication that proclaimed the child in the photo as the ideal Aryan baby.

The photographer said he had been invited by the Nazis to contribute photos for a contest to find the child who best represented the Aryan nation. Hessy’s photo won. The photographer enjoyed the joke, but Hessy’s parents did not. If the Nazis discovered the joke, all would be put to death, they feared. Mrs. Taft finally in 1987 revealed the truth of the Jewish baby who was the “ideal Aryan baby.” “I was that baby,” she said.

After going public with her story, Mrs. Taft was often asked what she thought of the photographer’s prank. “I can laugh about it now,” she told Tablet magazine in 2022 , “but if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive.”