Adolf Hitler was past caring, but on the day he killed himself with a single gunshot to the head, a 38-year-old American woman brazenly climbed naked into his bathtub, having first wiped her dirty boots on his fluffy white bathmat, and sat there having her photograph taken.
It was a perfectly-timed show of disrespect, and a vivid metaphor both for Hitler’s crimes and his downfall. The dirt that Lee Miller left on his bathmat had been picked up that morning at Dachau, the death camp liberated by US forces only the day before.
In Lee, the new film featuring Kate Winslet in the title role, the bathtub episode is meticulously re-created. Winslet is a decade older than Miller was, but the image in the film is a perfect match for the one captured on April 30, 1945.
It was Miller’s close friend David Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine, who took the snap 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 had also been a renowned model, a singular beauty who had an intoxicating effect on her many lovers. Regrettably, Lee the film does not really do justice to Miller and her amazingly eventful life. Nor, even, does it do justice to that single remarkable day.
Lee Miller’s close friend David Scherman took this portrait of her cleansing herself after she witnessed the horrors of the Dachau death camp that morning. She symbolically dirtied the white bath mat with the mud of Dachau from her boots
Miller arrived at Dachau from Nuremberg, about 100 miles north, on the morning of April 30. She had been tipped off that divisions of the US Seventh Army were heading to Germany’s ‘first and worst’ concentration camp.
Although she had already photographed another liberated camp, Buchenwald, not even the appalling sights there prepared her for Dachau. But by then she at least knew how horribly real it all was. Some of the Allied troops, unable to accept the evidence of their own eyes, at first thought the camps were propaganda stunts, faked by their own side.
‘Dante’s Inferno seemed pale compared to the real hell of Dachau,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Sparks, commander of the 45th Infantry Division.
The sun was shining as Miller and Scherman drove through the town of Dachau, north-west of Munich. Outside the camp there was a stationary train shrouded by clouds of flies.
As Allied forces closed in, the Nazis had hurriedly started to transport inmates from Buchenwald and elsewhere to Dachau. There were more than 2,000 corpses inside the train and about 800 people still alive. The stench of death was overpowering.
Miller documented the ghastly spectacle quickly but meticulously. Among the posse of photographers she was the only woman, yet she went about her grisly task more efficiently than most of the men sent to record the aftermath of liberation. ‘Lee took the pictures I could not 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 vast quantities of whisky.
Miller had some military-issue chocolate on her that day and offered it to the camp’s newly liberated inmates, an admirably human gesture but an unwise one, because she soon found herself mobbed. 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 could not cope.
Miller didn’t just take pictures, she also took the trouble to talk to people and coax their terrible stories from them. But the camera was her main instrument of record.
For the image – meticulously recreated by Kate Winslet in the movie Lee – Miller placed a picture of the Fuhrer on the bath, unaware that he would shoot himself that day
One biography describes how in just a few hours she documented the entire fabric of the camp, from the women prisoners who had ‘volunteered’ to work in the Dachau brothel to the captured SS guards, many of whom had, contemptibly, tried to disguise themselves as inmates.Afterwards, Miller described the experience in a letter to her editor at Vogue, Audrey Withers.
Dachau ‘had everything you’ll 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 which ached and shuffled and stamped away the cold and finally became useless except to walk… to the death chamber’.
That afternoon, ‘gulping for air’, she and Scherman drove into Munich, which had just been captured by the US Army. First they found a guide who showed them some of the city’s macabre landmarks, such as the site of Hitler’s failed 1923 coup, the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’.
Next they went to the command post hastily established by the 45th Division’s 179th Regiment, 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 dead. The bullet had been fired from Hitler’s own revolver.
She was rumoured to have been in a sexual relationship with her uncle, quite possibly non-consensual, and her death was ruled to be suicide. Whether or not Miller knew what had happened to Raubal, she was well aware of the significance of the Prinzregentenplatz building in the narrative of Nazism and the war. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘Hitler’s real home… physical as well as spiritual.’
She was duly delighted when the American officers there invited her to stay in the apartment and enjoy what she described as its ‘super modern comforts’ for as long as she wanted to remain in Munich. The apartment had been refurbished in 1935 at the cost of 120,000 Reichsmarks, ten times the annual salary of a doctor.
Hitler paid for it personally, out of the royalties that continued to flow in from sales of Mein Kampf.
Several British visitors described the flat as ‘unpretentious’, despite paintings by the Flemish Renaissance master Pieter Breugel, among others, and a lavish Persian reproduction of an enormous 16th-century royal carpet known as the Paradise Carpet.
Hitler was enormously proud of his Munich home, and in April 1935 gave a dinner there, on china initialled ‘AH’, for one of his most ardent female admirers, the British aristocrat Unity Mitford. ‘When one sits beside him it’s like sitting beside the sun,’ she wrote to her father, Lord Redesdale.
Lee Miller with two US soldiers in a shot captioned ‘Me with smallest and 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 Accord and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement from three years earlier were, as Chamberlain put it, ‘symbolic of the desire of our two countries never to go to war with one another again’.
Less than seven years later, a single photograph would symbolise a great deal of what had happened since. By the time Miller lowered herself into Hitler’s bath that evening, she had not bathed properly for weeks. After Dachau she was more than ready to be cleansed, but she found time for artifice as well as indulgence.
She propped up a picture of Hitler by the bath, and made sure that her boots were visible in the foreground, along with the dirty bath mat.
She also placed a classical statuette of a naked woman on an adjacent table, turning towards it 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 towards her own modelling career, and her role as muse to surrealists Jean Cocteau and her former lover Man Ray.
Burke also notes that Miller was only too aware that she would have emphatically met Hitler’s aesthetic standards of Aryan womanhood. As her only son, Antony Penrose, put it: ‘I think [in the bathtub picture] she was sticking two fingers up at Hitler… She is saying she is the victor.’
She was also, metaphorically, sticking two fingers up at the US Army lieutenant hammering on the door while she took her leisurely bath.
But the drama of that day was not yet over. At around midnight, the BBC broke the news that Hitler was dead, after its monitoring service picked up a solemn announcement on German state radio, which declared that their Fuhrer had ‘fallen fighting Bolshevism’. They didn’t say that, drug-addled in his Berlin bunker, he had killed himself.
Later, Miller recalled her emotions on learning, not long after stepping out of his bath, that the ‘monster’ was no more.
‘He’d never really been alive for me until today,’ she wrote.
Touching what he had touched, on the very day that she recorded the abominations he had overseen, was in some ways the defining experience of her extraordinary life.
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