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The Woman Who Took A Bath in Hitler's Tub

On 30 April 1945, Lee Miller was amongst the first to walk the newly liberated concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. She did more than wade through what she later described as the “dusty spaces that had been trampled by so many thousands of condemned feet”: Miller found herself undressing, running the water, and getting into a bath. This bathtub was not her own, but the bathtub of Adolf Hitler who, at that very moment, across Germany, was taking his own life. 

 

I have missed a vital detail to this tale — before getting into the bath, Miller set up her camera, and  David Scherman, her lover at the time, took her photo as she bathed. It was this photograph that would become a visual homage to the end of the war and the victory of the Allied powers. 

 

The bath photograph has been subject to various interpretations. It has been appropriated as a symbol of victory, but there is no way of knowing what it was that Miller felt as she sat in that bath. However, what one can do is use this photograph to understand who exactly Lee Miller was. 



Lee Miller has been associated with various identities: she is renowned as a Vogue supermodel, a muse to the Surrealist artist Man Ray, a master of the culinary world in her later years, and lastly, as a photographer. It is not an exaggeration to state that Lee Miller, like many other remarkable women, has been shrunk down into identities of model or muse: identities easy for misogynistic minds to grasp. There is no doubt that Miller excelled in these areas — but, in my opinion, it was her work as a war correspondent that is the most captivating. Her journey began in 1944 when Miller was accredited by US forces and sent to Normandy by British Vogue. There she found herself in the midst of carnage — and it is there that she produced her best work. 

 

Her oeuvre of work is expansive. Her archival collections depict a horrifying display of brutalities: one photograph shows two guards knelt begging for forgiveness, and another shows female sex workers released from a makeshift brothel on the site of a concentration camp. In Vienna, she captured an opera singer performing an aria at the bombed-out state opera house in Opennring. Miller’s photography is a great testimony to her character — a woman determined and unrestrained, whose particularity was to uncover the truth and nothing more.


I think what impresses me most about Miller is how her work is unapologetically grotesque. She did not care to abbreviate the violence she came across nor dissolve realities into digestible bites for the public. She captured brutalities on both sides of the front line. In some ways, her archival collections are more of an album of life on the fringes of humanity. Miller was committed to showcasing life in all its depravity — one of her photographs is titled Believe ItWhere most would turn away in repulsion and disgust, Miller stood forthright with her camera ready. 

 

Lee Miller was a woman who surpassed being extraordinary. That is why it is so painstaking to see her remarkability as a photographer overshadowed by her gender. Researching Miller, I found that most articles celebrate her for her beauty. Reduced to an appendage to the great male artists of Man Ray and Picasso, she is a muse, a beautiful thing. I have great qualms with this. To posit that her beauty was the remarkable thing about Miller is too great an injustice. It is to subject her to a male gaze so prominent that reception to her photograph in the bathtub has included the comment, “rugged glamour.”


Lee Miller was a woman who lived in all the tonalities and shades of existence. I myself have not even begun to do her justice. However, I do hope that I have brought attention to Lee Miller as an individual in her own right.


Illustration by Isabelle Holloway

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