Elizabeth “Lee” Miller took thousands of photos during World War II, but she’s perhaps best known for posing nude in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub the day he died by suicide.
U.S. ArmyLee Miller as a war correspondent during World War II.
One of the most iconic images from World War II came not from the battlefield but from Adolf Hitler’s bathtub. In it, an American photographer named Lee Miller is seen casually soaking in Hitler’s tub, her muddy combat boots on his bath mat. The image is defiant, bold, and sensual, but it only captures a small part of Miller’s electric life and career.
After stints as a model, a Surrealist artist, and a fashion photographer, Miller started taking photos of World War II. She was present during several pivotal moments during the war, including the Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the arrival of Allied forces at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Her photos of the concentration camps are both sensitive and shocking, including images of dead SS guards and pictures of emaciated prisoners.
But after the war ended, Lee Miller was more or less forgotten. In fact, her photos spent decades in the attic of her home — until her son stumbled upon her stunning archives. This is her story.
From The Cover Of ‘Vogue’ To The Front Lines Of World War II
Born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New York, Elizabeth “Lee” Miller had a difficult childhood. At the age of seven, she was raped during a trip to Brooklyn and contracted gonorrhea. In the aftermath, her father, an amateur photographer, started taking nude photographs of her. Miller’s feelings about the images are unknown, but she continued to model as an adult.
In 1927, Miller had a chance encounter with the publisher Condé Nast, which launched her modeling career. She posed for a Vogue cover that year, though her appearance in a Kotex ad shortly thereafter — then considered taboo — made it difficult for Miller to book further work.
Instead, she began to hone her skills as a photographer. Miller went to Europe to apprentice with artist Man Ray, where she also crossed paths with Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Miller became Man’s lover and muse, and she appeared in famous works of his, such as Indestructible Object.
Salvador Dalí MuseumA self-portrait of Lee Miller. 1930.
After leaving Man Ray, Miller was briefly married to an Egyptian businessman named Aziz Eloui Bey. But by 1939, she had made her way to London with a new boyfriend, the artist Roland Penrose. There, Lee Miller would have a front-row seat to the escalation of World War II.
Lee Miller During World War II: From Normandy To Saint-Malo To Paris
On Sept. 1, 1939, World War II began with the German invasion of Poland. Though Lee Miller was advised by the U.S. government to return home, she decided to stay in Europe. She applied to work as a photographer at Vogue, and though the magazine initially declined her application, Miller was eventually hired because so many young men were being sent to the front.
After initially languishing as a fashion photographer in the studio, Miller started taking photos of wartime London. She collaborated with others, including the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, to put together a photo book about the bombing of London known as the Blitz. Then, at the end of 1942, Lee Miller became a U.S. Army war correspondent with Condé Nast credentials.
Partnering with photojournalist David E. Scherman, Miller would go on to take some of the most iconic photographs of World War II. Many of her early pieces for Vogue were about women during the war, including the all-female British Army artillery known as the Auxiliary Territorial Service, U.S. Army nurses, and women serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
In 1944, Miller’s work took her from London to mainland Europe. Though women correspondents had very limited roles — they were not permitted to photograph combat, for example — Miller pushed the boundaries of what was possible. Assigned a short piece on U.S. Army nurses working in Normandy in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion, Miller penned a multi-page article on what she had seen accompanied by 14 photographs.
U.S. ArmyLee Miller (second from the right) with other female correspondents during World War II. Their movement was highly restricted, but Miller found herself in the thick of the action anyway.
Miller also found herself in the thick of the action in August 1944 when she traveled to the small coastal town of Saint-Malo, France. She had been assigned to Saint-Malo because the city had reportedly been liberated — but this intel was erroneous. Miller found herself as the only photojournalist in Saint-Malo, and she went to work covering the conflict.
“Machine gun fire belched from the end pillbox — the men fell flat — stumbling and crawling into the shelter of shell holes — some crept on, others sweeping back to the left of the guns’ angle, one man reaching the top,” Miller wrote of one attack she witnessed in Saint-Malo. “There was silence — poised — desperate. I could hear yells from slopes — orders — directions with nightmare faintness. There was a great black explosion where the most forward men had been a minute before.”
Shortly thereafter, Miller was sent to Paris to cover the liberation of the city from Nazi forces, a battle which took place between Aug. 19, 1944 and Aug 25, 1944. Describing the strange mix of joy, the ongoing firefights, and the scars of wartime destruction, Miller remarked: “Paris had gone mad.”
But Miller was only just beginning to experience the grim and gruesome insanity of the war. Next, she accompanied the U.S. Army as it moved east.
Photographing Concentration Camps — And Adolf Hitler’s Bathroom
On April 17, 1945, Lee Miller hitched a ride to Buchenwald after hearing that the concentration camp had been liberated (the 6th Armored Division had arrived at the camp on April 11). Though many prisoners had been sent on death marches, and though soldiers had buried the bodies of the dead that remained, Miller came across a horrifying scene. More than 50,000 people had died at the camp, and the sense of death and despair was still pungent.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial MuseumThe execution of SS Guards at Dachau during the liberation of the concentration camp.
“The six hundred bodies stacked in the courtyard of the crematorium because they had run out of coal the last five days had been carted away until only a hundred were left; and the splotches of death had been washed from the wooden potato masher because the place had to be disinfected; and the bodies on the whipping stalls were dummies instead of almost dead men who could feel but not react,” Miller wrote for Vogue.
She and her photography partner, Scherman, were also some of the first war correspondents to witness the atrocities of the Dachau concentration camp. They arrived on April 30, 1945, and Miller documented the horror of the starving prisoners and the bodies of SS guards.
“I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE!” Miller wrote in a telegram to Audrey Withers, the editor of Vogue, alongside some of the images she’d taken. Miller added: “I hope Vogue will feel that it can publish these pictures.”
In June 1945, the magazine did, alongside the headline: “Believe It.”
Buchenwald Memorial CollectionLee Miller sent a telegraph to Vogue about the atrocities she encountered at Buchenwald and Dachau.
However, Miller is probably best known for a photo in which she was not the photographer but the subject. After documenting Dachau, she and Scherman were assigned to lodgings at 16 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, which happened to include Adolf Hitler’s former private apartment.
Miller and Scherman both posed nude in Adolf Hitler’s elaborate bathtub, their muddy combat boots left on Hitler’s immaculate bath mat. Later that day, they found out that Hitler had died by suicide alongside his wife Eva Braun — a sure sign that the war was truly and finally ending.
How Lee Miller’s Photos Were Lost — And Rediscovered In An Attic
Though World War II officially ended on Sept. 2, 1945, Lee Miller was not ready to return to peacetime and domestic life. She spent several years photographing postwar Europe, including the January 1946 firing-squad execution of the former Hungarian prime minister, László Bárdossy, who had collaborated with the Nazis.
Miller eventually returned to England with Roland Penrose, with whom she’d have a son, Antony Penrose. But Miller’s postwar life could be a struggle. She grappled with depression and alcoholism, and she was uninspired by the assignments Vogue sent over.
That said, Lee Miller more or less left her wartime photography behind. She threw herself into home life and, when encouraged to share her work more widely, demurred. Her son told The Guardian in 2016 that she claimed she hadn’t done anything worthwhile during the war, saying: “Oh, I didn’t do much, it wasn’t of any importance and it’s all been destroyed since.”
This made it all the more surprising when Antony — who had a contentious relationship with his mother — stumbled across 60,000 negatives and prints in the attic of their East Sussex home long after Miller passed away in 1977.
Simon Harriyott/Wikimedia CommonsLee Miller’s former home has been converted into a museum, Farleys House and Gallery, which exhibits her work as well as that of her husband.
“The Lee I discovered was very different from the one I had been embattled with for so many years,” Antony said. On another occasion he remarked: “I could not believe she had been the same person that created this material.”
Thanks to Antony, that material has reached a wider audience. World War II — as seen through Lee Miller’s sharp eye — is now available to the public.