Lee Miller: From Vogue Cover to Dachau
Lee Miller (second from right) and other war correspondents.
Hitler's Bathtub
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin. On the same day, Life photographer David E. Scherman took an image of his friend Lee Miller sitting in the Fuhrer's bathtub in his Munich apartment.
Her combat boots, still muddy from visiting the Dachau concentration camp, stain Hitler's bath mat. She is cleaning her shoulder with Hitler's washcloth and she has a blank expression on her face.
On the side of the bathtub is a framed photograph of the Nazi leader. In staging the image, Miller was defying the memory of the monster who unleashed such horrors on the world. This was quite a leap for a woman whose first career was as a fashion model.
Lee Miller's Early Life
Elizabeth “Lee” Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in April 1907. Her father was an amateur photographer and he taught her the basics of the craft.
At 19, one of those serendipitous events happened that change people's lives forever. She was in Manhattan when she was almost hit by a car. She was saved from serious injury or worse by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue Magazine, among other prestigious titles.
Being at the peak of the fashion world, Nast knew model potential when he saw it. Within a year, she appeared on the cover of Vogue.
In 1930, she left New York for Paris to become involved in the surrealist movement. She lived with the artist and photographer Man Ray and socialized with artists such Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Max Ernst.
By 1933, she was back in New York and running a photo studio with her brother Erik. Then, came marriage, in 1934, to an Egyptian railroad magnate, Aziz Eloui Bey. But, the marriage only lasted three years, because Miller met, and fell in love with, the surrealist Roland Penrose. She left Bey and settled down in London with Penrose just as the Blitz began.
Lee Miller at the height of her modelling career.
War Photographer
As the bombs began falling on London, Miller took her camera to the streets to document the effect of the Blitz on ordinary people.
Penrose later wrote that “Lee wasted little time in getting around to Vogue studios and offering her services as a photographer. To begin with she was given the cold shoulder. Her professional work had lapsed by five years and the studio ... was well enough staffed.”
But, she persisted and started to focus her lens on the British women engaged in the war effort.
By 1942, she became an accredited war correspondent embedded with U.S. forces. The female reporters were restricted to covering non-combat topics such as military hospitals, but Miller wanted more.
She followed the troops into Europe after the D-Day invasion of June 1944. Her first assignment was to report on the newly liberated city of Saint-Malo, only it wasn't quite liberated when she got there.
The rules said that female war reporters could not go into areas of active combat. Lee Miller didn't care for rules. For five days, she stayed in the combat zone photographing everything.
But, the military was not amused when they discovered she was in places where bullets and shrapnel were flying. She was booted out of the region and placed under house arrest. It was just a warning shot to Miller to behave herself and not go where she was not supposed to. She took little heed of the restrictions.
She accompanied the advancing American forces and, by late August 1944, was in Paris. She wrote that “I was with the first American troops in the liberation of Paris and the first thing I did was to go to see my old friend Picasso. Picasso always said I was the first American soldier he saw.”
U.S. soldiers march down the Champs Élysées following the liberation of Paris.
The Horror of Dachau
As American forces pushed into Belgium, Luxembourg, and southern Germany, Miller was with them. On April 29, 1945, the first soldiers entered the Dachau death camp, north of Munich. The following day, Lee Miller joined them.
As she approached she would have known something unspeakable had happened there. The air was filled with the smell of decay and excrement; a stench that caused battle-hardened soldiers to weep and to vomit.
Pfc Harold Porter wrote to his parents about what he saw in Dachau:
“I know you will hesitate to believe me no matter how objective and focused I try to be. I even find myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my own eyes. Certainly, what I have seen in the past few days will affect my personality for the rest of my life ... When we reached the furnace house we came upon a huge stack of corpses piled up like kindling, all nude so that their clothes wouldn’t be wasted by the burning. There were furnaces for burning six bodies at once, and on each side of them was a room twenty feet square crammed to the ceiling with more bodies - one big stinking rotten mess. Their faces purple, their eyes popping, and with a hideous grin on each one. They were nothing but bones & skins.”
Freed Dachau prisoners greet their American liberators. Most of the 30,000 inmates were starving, disease ridden, and emaciated.
Lee Miller was documenting this with her camera, but her editor at the British Vogue, Audrey Withers, refused to publish the images. She argued that the British public had suffered so much through the war that they didn't need to see any further atrocities. Miller was furious and sent a message to Withers: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.”
At the end of a day at Dachau, Lee and her friend David Scherman went to nearby Munich where they staged the image of her in Hitler's bathtub.
Later, her husband, Roland Penrose, wrote of the image:
“And now she is stamping the filth, the degradation, the horror of that place, she’s stamping that into Hitler’s nice, clean bath. And that proves that she’s not sitting there as a guest in his house—she’s actually a victor and it’s like she’s metaphorically grinding her heel into his face. What she and Scherman had no way of knowing was that at 4.45 that afternoon ... in Berlin, Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves.”
Lee Miller's Difficult Peacetime
Following the war, Lee and Penrose settled into a pastoral life in the English countryside. She tried doing fashion shoots for Vogue but life was difficult for her. She never spoke about her wartime experiences and hid thousands of photographs and negatives away in the attic. These were later discovered by her son Antony.
Miller suffered from depression and self-medicated with alcohol. She clearly had what we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder. A response to all the ghastly scenes she had witnessed.
She died in 1977 at the age of 70.
Bonus Factoids
- Lee Miller was just seven years old when she was raped by a family friend and the assault left her with a case of gonorrhea. It wasn't until the 1940s with the arrival of antibiotics that an effective cure was available.
- In 2009, archival files opened in Britain revealed that the secret service had placed Lee Miller under surveillance after a tip-off that she was a Communist sympathizer. A Special Branch report noted that “She is violently anti-Nazi. The general opinion is that her Communism is more a mental outlook than anything and we have obtained no information that she is associated with any particular subversive political organisation.”
- The American journalist Martha Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship that took her to Omaha Beach on D-Day. On the day after the landings, she jumped onto a water ambulance to help pick up wounded soldiers. When the hospital ship returned to England, she was arrested and banished to a training camp for nurses. But, she got her story; the first reporter, male or female, to chronicle the Omaha Beach fight from the location.
- In September 2024, a movie about Lee Miller's life, starring Kate Winslet, was released.
- “Who Was Lee Miller? Why the Model-Turned-War Photographer Is Finally Getting Her Due.” Jacqui Palumbo, CNN, December 14, 2023
- “Who Was Lee Miller? The Model-Turned-War Correspondent Who Photographed WW2 Horrors.” Elinor Evans, BBC History Extra, September 13, 2024.
- “Now I Owned a Private War’: Lee Miller and the Female Journalists Who Broke Battlefield Rules.” Judith Mackrell, The Guardian, September 11, 2024.
- “Everything You Need to Know About Lee Miller—in Vogue and Beyond.” Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue, September 11, 2023.
- “ 'It Is Difficult to Know How to Begin': A U.S. Soldier Writes Home From Dachau.” Rebecca Onion, Slate, May 2, 2014.
- “Revealed: MI5 Spied on Swedish Actress and Vogue Photographer as Communist Sympathisers.” Vanessa Allen, Daily Mail, March 3, 2009.
- “Martha Gellhorn Was the Only Woman to Report on the D-Day Landings From the Ground.” David Kindy, Smithsonian Magazine, June 4, 2024.
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
© 2024 Rupert Taylor
