Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub

Last week saw the celebrations of the 80^th anniversary of the D-Day landings so it seemed a good time to share this arresting image by Lee Miller that also belongs to the end of the Second World War.

On the same day that she had photographed the atrocities at Dachau concentration camp, Lee found herself in the building where Hitler had been living and, in true surrealist style, set up a documentary shot in his bathroom.

It is an iconic image that speaks of the horrors of war and references the ‘bathrooms’ that were really gas chambers in the death camps.  Any artist or journalist who faces up to the worst that humans can do and faithfully reports it without regard for personal safety is heroic. Therefore, even in this most disturbing picture, I believe that some good can be found.

Photograph by David Scherman 1945 © Lee Miller Archives

They say that this is your victory celebration: cavorting in Hitler’s home on the day of his death in April 1945.  But I’m not sure.  I know you were drunk, just like Dave, the man who took the photo and helped set up this outrageously ironic scene.  But you are not smiling.  How could you?

Just hours before, you had been in Dachau concentration camp, photographing heaps of corpses, and the dirt on your boots that blackens the white bath mat in Hitler’s pristine bathroom brings the hell of the camp with it.  Your face, darkened by the accumulated dirt of having no way to wash properly for weeks, seems to symbolise the effect of the horrors you have seen.

You have tossed your U.S. uniform on the chair.  It took weeks to get commissioned as a war reporter and you have exceeded your brief of documenting women’s part in the war over and over.  The American soldiers have almost stopped thinking of you as a woman.

I am so sad for you, Lee.  This, perhaps, was the day that marked the end of your adrenalin-filled life of action, the excitement you felt and the time of knowing that your work mattered.  It still does.  But with the peace came moral confusion: the enemy was so much harder to identify and for you, it brought terrible, long-lasting depression.

Because you dared to immerse yourself in the reality of war and never stopped responding to it as a woman with a heart and emotions, you created images that form a collective memory, and warning.  But as you climbed into the bath you must have known, even through the fog of drunkenness, that by placing Hitler’s portrait on the side of the tub and having Dave take a photograph of you naked next to it, you had taken a step which was inherently dangerous to your sanity.  You humanised the Führer using your own body and inserted yourself into his iconography.  You wrote later that the spectacle of his home and its comforts made him less remote and that, seeing him as just a human like any other, it occurred to you that his monstrous evil could have been anyone’s.  Even your own.

Travelling through Germany in 1945 you were incensed and bewildered by the way ordinary people denied all knowledge of the atrocities that had gone on nearby.  You grew to hate Germans, and the collaborators in Hungary, but with each new situation, the moral mess of war destabilised your certainties.  And then there was the sudden beauty and painterly composition of scenes of violence, such as the calm, classical perfection of the SS officer's daughter you photographed after her suicide.  She lies on a couch and you photograph her as if she was a beautiful model in the old style of Vogue features but this time it’s not a new fashion collection. Instead, it’s the ugly aftermath of war. 

There is classical art in this photo in Hitler’s bathroom, too.  You look, pointedly, at a nude sculpture by someone called Rudolf Kaesbach.  As if considering your own past as a model as well as the whole tradition of fine art, you seem, at best, ambivalent.  Is this because, as your biographer Caroline Burke suggests, you see in the sculpture a reminder of Hitler’s Aryan ideal and the way in which you conform to it with your blue eyes and blonde hair?  Is it the beginning of survivor guilt, on this day after you photographed the women who had been forced to serve as prostitutes to the officers at Dachau?

In the middle of this jape, leaping into Hitler’s bath and revelling in the first hot water and soap you had encountered for ages and horsing around with Dave to set up a shot that would humiliate Hitler by identifying the room as his, did you feel, suddenly and remorsefully, in that sinking moment as the drinks wore off, so stained, so ruined, so darkened by what you had seen, that you knew it would never leave you?

Would it help to say that it was worth it?  To say that your later years of depression and alcoholism cannot erase for us now your contribution to surrealist photography, the luminous portraits of you by Man Ray or the record of the war you made with an honest, courageous, unblinking eye. 

To leave a record of the worst that humans can do to each other is a heavy burden and to sit in the heart of evil and witness it, unprotected by your uniform or clothing, was too much.  The dirt of Dachau on your skin could never be washed away, but you were brave enough to go there so that we would see what it was like.  Lee, I salute you.