Adolf Hitler didn’t care, but on the day he committed suicide with a single shot to the head, a 38-year-old American woman shamelessly climbed into his bathtub naked, after first wiping her dirty boots on his fluffy white bath mat, and sat down. her photo was taken there.
It was a perfectly timed show of disrespect and a vivid metaphor for both Hitler’s crimes and his downfall. The dirt that Lee Miller had left on his bath mat had been picked up that morning at Dachau, the death camp that had been liberated by American forces the day before.
In Lee, the new film starring Kate Winslet in the title role, the bathtub episode is meticulously recreated. Winslet is ten years older than Miller, but the image in the film perfectly matches the image captured on April 30, 1945.
It was Miller’s close friend David Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine, who took the photo of her in Hitler’s bath. But she herself was a brilliant photographer, employed by the fashion magazine Vogue to highlight the conflict from many different angles.
Before the war she had also been a renowned model, a special beauty who had an intoxicating effect on her many lovers. Unfortunately, the Lee film doesn’t really do justice to Miller and her amazingly eventful life. It doesn’t even do justice to that one remarkable day.
Lee Miller’s close friend David Scherman created this portrait of her cleansing after witnessing the horrors of the Dachau death camp that morning. She symbolically soiled the white bath mat with Dachau mud from her boots
Miller arrived at Dachau on the morning of April 30 from Nuremberg, about 100 miles north. She had been tipped off that divisions of the US Seventh Army were heading for Germany’s “first and worst” concentration camp.
Although she had already photographed another liberated camp, Buchenwald, even the terrible sights there did not prepare her for Dachau. But at least by then she knew how terribly real it all was. Some Allied forces, unable to accept the evidence from their own eyes, initially thought the camps were propaganda stunts imitated by their own side.
“Dante’s Inferno seemed pale compared to the real hell of Dachau,” wrote Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, commander of the 45th Infantry Division.
The sun shone as Miller and Scherman drove through the city of Dachau, northwest of Munich. Outside the camp stood a stationary train, shrouded in clouds of flies.
As Allied forces closed in, the Nazis had hurriedly begun transporting prisoners from Buchenwald and elsewhere to Dachau. There were more than 2,000 bodies on the train and about 800 people were still alive. The stench of death was overwhelming.
Miller quickly but painstakingly documented the gruesome scene. She was the only woman among the group of photographers, yet she performed her grisly task more efficiently than most of the men sent to document the aftermath of the liberation. “Lee took the pictures I couldn’t take,” a Frenchman, Jacques Hindermeyer, recalled years later.
But Dachau left an emotional scar that never fully healed. In later years she found refuge from her memories in large amounts of whiskey.
Miller brought military-made chocolate with her that day and offered it to the camp’s newly liberated prisoners, an admirable human gesture but ill-advised, as she was soon harassed. It was dangerous in more ways than one to give food to those who had been denied it for so long. Some of them died because what was left of their digestive systems couldn’t cope.
Miller not only took photos, she also took the time to talk to people and get their terrible stories out of them. But the camera was her main recording instrument.
For the image – meticulously recreated by Kate Winslet in the film Lee – Miller placed a photo of the Führer on the bathtub, unaware that he would shoot himself that day
One biography describes how, in just a few hours, she documented the entire structure of the camp, from the female prisoners who “volunteered” to work in the Dachau brothel to the captured SS guards, many of whom acted in despicable wise had tried to disguise themselves. as prisoners. Miller then described the experience in a letter to her editor at Vogue, Audrey Withers.
Dachau “had everything you will ever hear or close your ears to about a concentration camp,” she wrote, describing “the great dusty spaces that had been trampled by so many thousands of condemned feet—feet that ached and shuffled and stamped the ground.” cold and ultimately useless except to walk… to the death chamber’.
That afternoon, “gasping for air,” she and Scherman drove into Munich, which had just been captured by the American army. First, they found a guide who showed them some of the city’s macabre sights, such as the site of Hitler’s failed 1923 coup, the “Beer Hall Putsch.”
They then went to the command post hastily established by the 179th Regiment of the 45th Division, the house at Prinzregentenplatz 16 (Prince Regent Square) where Hitler had lived since the 1920s. His half-niece Geli Raubal had shared his second-floor apartment from 1929 to 1931 when she was found there at the age of 23 and shot dead. The bullet had been fired from Hitler’s own revolver.
She was rumored to have had a sexual relationship with her uncle, possibly without mutual consent, and her death was ruled a suicide. Whether or not Miller knew what happened to Raubal, she was well aware of the significance of the Prinzregentenplatz building in the story of Nazism and the war. “It was,” she said, “Hitler’s real home, both physically and spiritually.”
She was delighted when the American officers invited her to stay in the apartment and enjoy what she described as its “super-modern comforts” as long as she wanted to stay in Munich. The apartment had been renovated in 1935 at a cost of 120,000 Reichsmarks, ten times the annual salary of a doctor.
Hitler paid for it personally, from the royalties that continued to come in from the sales of Mein Kampf.
Several British visitors described the flat as ‘unpretentious’, despite paintings by the likes of Flemish Renaissance master Pieter Breugel and a lavish Persian reproduction of a huge 16th-century royal carpet known as the Paradise Carpet.
Hitler was immensely proud of his Munich home and gave a dinner there in April 1935, on porcelain with the initials ‘AH’, for one of his most ardent female admirers, the British aristocrat Unity Mitford. “When someone sits next to him it is like sitting next to the sun,” she wrote to her father, Lord Redesdale.
Lee Miller with two American soldiers in a shot with the text “Me with the smallest and the tallest”
The German Chancellor also hosted Neville Chamberlain in his apartment when the British Prime Minister visited Munich in September 1938. It was there that Hitler signed a joint agreement declaring that the Munich Agreement and the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of three years earlier, as Chamberlain said it was ‘symbolic of the desire of our two countries never to make war with each other again ‘.
Less than seven years later, a single photo would come to symbolize much of what had happened since then. By the time Miller sank into Hitler’s bath that evening, she had not bathed properly in weeks. After Dachau, she was more than ready to be cleansed, but she found time for both artifice and indulgence.
She posted a photo of Hitler by the bath and made sure her boots, along with the dirty bath mat, were visible in the foreground.
She also placed a classical statue of a naked woman on an adjacent table, turned towards it and echoed the woman’s pose.
Carolyn Burke, author of the authoritative book Lee Miller: On Both Sides Of The Camera, suggests that this was a conscious nod to her own modeling career and her role as muse to the surrealists Jean Cocteau and her former lover Man Ray.
Burke also notes that Miller was all too aware that she would have emphatically conformed to Hitler’s aesthetic standards of Aryan femininity. As her only son, Antony Penrose, put it: “I think [in the bathtub picture] she stuck two fingers at Hitler… She says she is the victor.”
She also raised two fingers, metaphorically speaking, at the US Army lieutenant who was hammering on the door while she took a leisurely bath.
But the drama of that day was not over yet. Around midnight, the BBC broke the news that Hitler was dead, after its monitoring service picked up a solemn announcement on German state radio declaring that their Führer had “fallen in the fight against Bolshevism.” They did not say that, addicted to drugs in his Berlin bunker, he had committed suicide.
Later, Miller recalled her emotions when she learned, not long after getting out of his bath, that the “monster” was no longer there.
“Until today, he had never really lived for me,” she wrote.
Touching what he had touched, on the very day she recorded the horrors he had seen, was in some ways the defining experience of her extraordinary life.