JERUSALEM (AFP) - A US Jewish woman has presented the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust with a magazine cover of her as a baby that the Nazis had used as an Aryan poster child.

The mother of Hessy Taft, born in Berlin in 1934 of Jewish parents, took Taft at six months to a professional photographer for a portrait.

To their surprise, the photo turned up seven months later on the front page of weekly magazine "Sonne ins Haus" (Sun in House) aimed at German families.

It had been entered into a competition organised by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to find "the most beautiful German Aryan baby".

Taft and her family fled Nazi persecution of the Jews in 1938 and she finally settled in the United States after World War II.