Sitting in the bath, she washes her shoulder.
The photograph appears ordinary until you notice the portrait of Adolf Hitler. For this was no ordinary bathtub, it was the Nazi leader’s own, and the woman was far from ordinary too.
She was former Vogue model turned war photographer Lee Miller, who is played by Kate Winslet in a new film out next year.
Miller spent three nights at Hitler’s Munich apartment after the dictator’s defeat. When criticised by some for her photograph, Miller simply said: “I washed the dirt of Dachau off in his tub.”
Her boots, also in the picture, were filthy from walking through the liberated concentration camp just hours before.
Miller led an incredible life. As well as slipping into Hitler’s bath on April 30, 1945 – the day he is believed to have killed himself – she took more than 60,000 photos laying bare the atrocities of the Second World War.
From the Battle of Alsace to the liberation of Paris from the Germans in 1944, Miller captured almost all of the War’s major events for Vogue.
She also showcased the role of women in the war effort, producing several series of pictures of nurses at work and female air raid wardens in masks.
Pictures of Oscar winner Kate, 46, on the set of the movie emerged this week. She paid tribute, saying: “Lee was the woman who was documenting war for women, through women’s eyes, for a women’s magazine.”
Breathtakingly beautiful, Elizabeth “Lee” Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in April 1907. Vogue publisher Condé Nast stopped her from stepping into the path of an oncoming car in 1926 and immediately signed her up as a model.
After two years, she decided her future lay behind, not in front of, the lens, saying: “I’d rather take a photograph than be one.”
Miller had been an apprentice of surrealist photographer Man Ray and was painted six times by Pablo Picasso. She met the impressionist in 1937 while on holiday in France with her future husband, artist Sir Roland Penrose.
If her son Antony had not found thousands of examples of her war photography after she died of cancer aged 70 in 1977, she may have gone down in history as an artist’s muse.
Her shots of devastation dated back to 1939 when she was living in London during the Blitz.
In 1942 she travelled with the US Army around Europe, sending her film back to Vogue. She arrived in Normandy in July 1944, after the Allies invaded Nazi-occupied Europe.
Miller witnessed the American assault on the German-held port of St Malo in France.
The only photojournalist there, she recalled: “I was given a grandstand view of fortress warfare”.
Some of her most famous work was bringing the Holocaust to light. In 1945, Miller accompanied Allied forces’ advance into Germany and was with them when they discovered the camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.
Miller wasn’t afraid of capturing the atrocities. “I implore you to believe this is true,” said Miller, when she sent images back to her editors at Vogue images of heaps of dead bodies and emaciated survivors.
After the war, Miller trained at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and became an award-winning chef. Cooking was an escape from PTSD and clinical depression from war.
“It would’ve been easy for her to disappear to America and sit the war out,” said Antony. “But she wanted to stay and try to do something. She used her camera.”
