In the spring of 1945, Lee Miller entered the liberated concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau with American troops and photographed prisoners, the bodies of people killed in the genocide, and the evidence left behind. When she sent the film to Vogue, she included a brief telegram: "I beg you to believe this is true." The day after visiting Dachau, Miller arrived in Munich, entered Adolf Hitler's apartment, and asked her colleague David E. Scherman to photograph her in his bathtub; on the white bath mat in front of her stood the army boots she had worn through the concentration camp. It is difficult to believe that eighteen years earlier, Miller had been on the other side of the camera-and, in fact, on the cover of Vogue as a model.
On the Other Side of the Camera
Lee Miller's first appearance in Vogue happened almost by accident, when she was just nineteen. In 1927, she narrowly avoided being hit by a car in New York and was pulled out of danger by publisher Condé Nast. Struck by her appearance, he suggested that she try modeling for the magazine, and on March 15 her face appeared on the cover of American Vogue: artist Georges Lepape depicted Miller in a cloche hat against a city backdrop. Before long, she was working regularly as a model and posing for Edward Steichen, one of the leading fashion photographers of the period.
Miller herself, however, wanted a career that was less glossy. In 1929, she moved to Paris and sought out Man Ray, the American photographer and artist associated with Surrealism, a movement fascinated by dreams, unexpected associations, and unconventional combinations of images. Miller became his student, model, and creative collaborator. Together, they experimented with solarization, a technique in which a photograph is briefly exposed to light again during development, producing bright outlines around figures and altering the tonal range of the image.
Within a few years, Miller was working as an independent photographer. She first opened her own studio in New York and, by the end of the 1930s, had settled in London. When World War II began, she chose not to return to the United States and instead began photographing for British Vogue. During the early years of the war, the magazine continued to publish her fashion shoots, portraits, and still lifes, but wartime London gradually entered the frame as well. Miller photographed the city after German bombing raids, civil defense workers, and women taking on new jobs during the war. Between 1940 and 1944, her photographs appeared in nearly every issue of British Vogue.
In December 1942, Miller received accreditation as a war correspondent with the U.S. Army. The British military did not grant such accreditation to women at the time, while American rules allowed female journalists to accompany troops on the condition that they did not work directly in active combat zones. Miller's first wartime assignments therefore focused on American nurses stationed in Britain.
After the Allied landings in Normandy in the summer of 1944, she followed the U.S. Army into France. In August, her editors sent her to Saint-Malo, a fortified coastal city where the fighting was expected to be nearly over. By the time Miller arrived, however, the battle was still underway.
Miller stayed.
For four days, she photographed American soldiers, artillery fire, and the destruction of the city. Her accreditation still did not permit her to work in an active combat zone, so after Saint-Malo, the U.S. military briefly placed her under house arrest. Miller nevertheless continued moving with the Allied advance afterward. She also made her way to liberated Paris and was among the first to seek out her old friend Pablo Picasso, whom she had known from her prewar years in France. Miller later recalled that he greeted her by saying, "You're the first American soldier I've seen." Fifteen years earlier, she had arrived in Paris to study photography with Man Ray; now she stood before Picasso in the uniform of a war correspondent.
By the spring of 1945, Lee Miller had crossed into Germany.
"I Beg You to Believe This Is True"
In April 1945, Miller and Life photographer David E. Scherman reached Buchenwald and then arrived at Dachau shortly after the camp had been liberated by American troops. Miller photographed emaciated prisoners, the bodies of people who had died or been killed there, and other evidence of what had taken place inside the camp.
She sent the film to Audrey Withers, editor-in-chief of British Vogue, along with a telegram that read, "I beg you to believe this is true." Miller insisted that the magazine publish the photographs despite their content. In June 1945, Vogue ran the report under the headline Believe It and showed its readers images from the concentration camps.
From Dachau, Miller and Scherman traveled to Munich, where American correspondents were housed in an apartment that turned out to belong to Hitler. Miller removed her dirty military uniform, placed her boots on the white bath mat, and sat down in the bathtub. A photograph of Hitler stood on the edge of the tub, while Scherman held the camera. According to the Lee Miller Archives, the soles of her boots still carried dirt from Dachau, where she had been the day before; Hitler died by suicide on the same day the photograph was taken.
Miller's work as a World War II correspondent did not end there. She continued photographing Germany and the devastated postwar landscape of Europe for several more years before eventually returning to Britain. Yet it was in 1945 that the magazine which had once shown the world Lee Miller's face showed the world the war through her eyes.
