The Ultimate Trolling Against the Nazis

On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag or parliament of the German Third Reich passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Comprising the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law, these edicts forbade intermarriage or premarital sex between Aryans and non-Aryans - namely Jews and Roma - categorized people according to ancestry, and denied full citizenship to those who did not meet the proscribed standards for racial purity. As part of this effort to create a unified race-based Volksgemeinschaft or “people’s community,” the Nazi government ran countless propaganda campaigns aimed at illustrating the ideal Aryan citizen. Early that same year, the family magazine Sonne ins Haus or “Sunshine in the Home” held a photo contest to find the “perfect Aryan child.” On January 24, the magazine splashed the winner across its front cover: a beautiful round-cheeked, wide-eyed six-month-old girl. Over the following few years, this photograph was widely circulated around the Reich, appearing in other publications and on postcards. Four years later in late 1939, shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Sunday edition of the daily newspaper Berliner Tagesblatt ran a photograph of the “ideal German soldier”: a handsome 20-year-old man standing 5’ 11” with sandy blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. This image too was widely reprinted, being used in recruiting posters and other propaganda material. Now at this point you’ve probably guessed where this is going. Little did the Nazi propagandists know, but these two symbols of Aryan racial purity were actually anything but. This is the unlikely story of Hessy Levinsons and Werner Goldberg, Hitler’s Jewish poster children. This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout