Just hours after Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30th, 1945, former fashion model and Vogue
correspondent, Elizabeth Lee Miller was photographed taking a bath in
his tub. Miller had been accredited into the U.S. Army as an
official war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications and upon the
American liberation of Munich, she entered the city with the 45th
division and LIFE photographer David E. Scherman at her side. Lee and
David began to explore the crumbling city and by chance, happened to
wander into an apartment building at number 16 Prinzenregentplatz.
Incredibly, the pair had stumbled upon Hitler’s abandoned Munich
apartment.
”Almost anyone with a medium income and no heirlooms could have been the proprietor of this flat,” Miller wrote in her diaries,
“The place was in perfect condition, including electricity and hot
water and heat available and [an] electric refrigerator. It wasn’t empty
enough to be ‘sub-let’ as it stood, but a quarter of an hour’s clearing
cupboards would have made it ready for any new tenant who didn’t mind
linen and silver marked AH.”
The photograph was taken by David.
Allegedly there is also a photograph taken by Miller of David in the
bath. A former model and looking as she did, it was the
photograph of Miller as the subject that became the iconic image of
their collaboration during World War II. “I looked like an angel on the
outside. That’s how people saw me,” wrote Miller. “But I was like a
demon inside. I had known all the suffering of the world since I was
very a little girl.”
Many questions surround
Miller’s decision to disrobe in the Nazi leaders private bathroom, bathe herself, possibly using his flannel. The pair reportedly spent up
to three nights in the apartment together, sitting at his desk, sleeping in his bed, “using Hitler’s toilet and taking his bath and generally making ourselves at home,”
wrote Miller. They had just come from Dachau, and with those
double-buckled boots that sit in front of the bath, Miller had walked
through the horror of the death camp only a few hours earlier. In the
midst of controversy following the photograph’s publication in Vogue, Miller said that she had merely been trying to wash the odors of Dachau away.
In a letter to her Vogue editor, Audrey Winters, Miller recounts her stay in Hitler’s home:
“I was living in Hitler’s private
apartment when his death was announced, midnight of Mayday … Well,
alright, he was dead. He’d never really been alive to me until today.
He’d been an evil-machine-monster all these years, until I visited the
places he made famous, talked to people who knew him, dug into
backstairs gossip and ate and slept in his house. He became less
fabulous and therefore more terrible, along with a little evidence of
his having some almost human habits; like an ape who embarrasses and
humbles you with his gestures, mirroring yourself in caricature. “There,
but for the Grace of God, walks I."
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