Epic odyssey of the intrepid Vogue photographer who found herself naked in Hitler’s bathtub…and inspired Kate Winslet’s new film

Adolf Hitler no longer cared, but on the day he committed suicide with a single gunshot to the head, a 38-year-old American woman brazenly entered his bathtub naked, after first wiping her boots dirty on her soft white bath mat, and sat down. there, she had her photo taken.

It was a perfectly timed display of disrespect and a striking metaphor for Hitler’s crimes and his downfall. The dirt Lee Miller left on his bath mat had been picked up that morning at Dachau, the death camp liberated the day before by American forces.

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 film image perfectly matches the one taken on April 30, 1945.

Miller’s close friend David Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine, took the photo of her in Hitler’s bath. But she was a brilliant photographer herself, employed by the fashion magazine Vogue to cover the conflict from many different angles.

Before the war, she was also a renowned model, a singular beauty who intoxicated her many lovers. Unfortunately, Lee, the film doesn’t really do justice to Miller and his incredibly eventful life. It also doesn’t even do justice to this remarkable day.

Miller arrived in Dachau from Nuremberg, about 100 miles north, on the morning of April 30. She had been informed that divisions of the US Seventh Army were heading towards Germany’s “first and worst” concentration camp.

Although she had previously photographed another liberated camp, Buchenwald, even the dreadful sights there did not prepare her for Dachau. But in that moment, she at least knew how horribly real it all was. Some Allied troops, unable to accept the testimony with their own eyes, initially thought the camps were propaganda stunts rigged by their own side.

“Dante’s Inferno seemed pale in comparison to the real hell of Dachau,” wrote Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, commander of the 45th Infantry Division.

The sun was shining as Miller and Scherman drove through the town of Dachau, northwest of Munich. Outside the camp, there was a stationary train shrouded in swarms of flies.

As Allied forces closed in, the Nazis began hastily transporting detainees from Buchenwald and elsewhere to Dachau. There were more than 2,000 dead bodies inside the train and around 800 people still alive. The stench of death was overwhelming.

Miller documented the horrific spectacle quickly but meticulously. Among the group of photographers, she was the only woman, yet she carried out her gruesome task more effectively than most of the men sent to photograph the aftermath of the liberation. “Lee took the photos I couldn’t take,” recalled a Frenchman, Jacques Hindermeyer, years later.

But Dachau left an emotional scar that never fully healed. She later found refuge from her memories in large quantities of whiskey.

Miller had military chocolate with her that day and offered it to the camp’s newly released inmates, an admirably humane but reckless gesture, as she soon found herself mobbed. It was dangerous in more ways than one to give food to those who had been deprived of it for so long. Some of them died because what was left of their digestive systems could no longer cope.

Miller not only took photos, she also took the trouble to talk to people and get them to tell their terrible stories. But the camera was his main recording instrument.

One biography describes how, in just a few hours, she documented the entire camp, from the prisoners who had “volunteered” to work in the Dachau brothel to the captured SS guards, many of whom had despicable, tried to disguise himself. as prisoners. Afterward, Miller described the experience in a letter to her Vogue editor, Audrey Withers.

Dachau “had everything one could hear or turn a blind eye to about a concentration camp,” she writes, describing “the great dusty spaces that had been trampled by so many thousands of condemned feet – feet that made evil, dragged and trampled the world.” cold and eventually became useless except for walking…to the death chamber.”

That afternoon, “looking for air,” she and Scherman went to Munich, which had just been captured by the American army. They first found a guide who showed them some of the city’s grisly landmarks, 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 16 Prinzregentenplatz (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, aged 23, shot to death. The bullet had been fired from Hitler’s own revolver.

It was rumored that she had a sexual relationship with her uncle, probably non-consensual, and her death was ruled a suicide. Whether or not Miller knew what had happened to Raubal, she was well aware of the importance of the Prinzregentenplatz building in the narrative of Nazism and war. “It was,” she said, “Hitler’s true home… physical as well as spiritual.”

She was truly delighted when the American officers invited her to stay in the apartment and enjoy what she described as its “ultra-modern comforts” for as long as she wished to stay in Munich. The apartment was 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 flow from sales of Mein Kampf.

Several British visitors described the apartment as “unpretentious”, despite paintings by the Flemish Renaissance master Pieter Breugel, among others, and a sumptuous Persian reproduction of an enormous 16th-century royal carpet known as the Tapis du Heaven.

Hitler was extremely proud of his Munich house, and in April 1935 he gave a dinner there, on china initialed “AH”, for one of his most ardent admirers, the British aristocrat Unity Mitford. “When you sit next to him, it’s like sitting next to the sun,” she wrote to her father, Lord Redesdale.

The German Chancellor also hosted Neville Chamberlain in his apartment during the British Prime Minister’s visit to Munich in September 1938. It was there that Hitler signed a joint agreement declaring that the Munich Agreement and the Anglo Naval Agreement -German wars of three years earlier were, as Chamberlain put it, “symbolic of the desire of our two countries never again to go to war with each other.”

Less than seven years later, a single photograph would symbolize much of what has happened since. By the time Miller dove into Hitler’s bath that evening, she hadn’t washed properly in weeks. After Dachau, she was more than ready to be purified, but she found time for artifice as well as indulgence.

She placed a photo of Hitler near the bath and made sure his boots were visible in the foreground, as well as the dirty bath mat.

She also placed a classical statuette of a nude woman on an adjacent table, turning toward her and echoing the woman’s posture.

Carolyn Burke, author of the authoritative book Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera, suggests that this was a deliberate 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 clearly have met Hitler’s aesthetic standards of Aryan womanhood. As her only son, Antony Penrose, said: “I think (in the bathtub photo) she was holding up two fingers at Hitler… She’s saying she’s the victorious one.”

She also metaphorically raised two fingers at the U.S. Army lieutenant who was pounding on the door while she quietly took her bath.

But the drama of that day was not yet over. Around midnight, the BBC announced Hitler’s death, after its surveillance services picked up a solemn announcement on German state radio, which declared that their Führer had “fallen fighting Bolshevism.” It was not said that, drugged in his Berlin bunker, he committed suicide.

Miller later recalled her emotions upon learning, shortly after emerging from her bath, that the “monster” was no more.

“He was never really alive to me until today,” she wrote.

Touching what he had touched, on the very day she recorded the abominations he had overseen, was in some ways the defining experience of her extraordinary life.