Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 â July 21, 1977), was an American photographer and photojournalist. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
At the outbreak of World War II, Miller was living in Hampstead in London with Penrose when the bombing of the city began. Ignoring pleas from friends and family to return to the US, Miller embarked on a new career in photojournalism as the official war photographer for Vogue, documenting the Blitz. She was accredited with the U.S. Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942. She teamed up with the American photographer David E. Scherman, a Life correspondent on many assignments. She traveled to France less than a month after D-Day and recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of St. Malo, as well as the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Scherman’s photograph of Miller in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich, with its shower hose looped in the center behind her head and the dust of Dachau on her boots deliberately dirtying Hitler’s bathroom, is one of the most iconic images from the MillerâScherman partnership, and occurred on April 30, 1945, coincidentally the same day as Hitler’s suicide. Being one of the first to arrive at Hitler’s secret apartments, Miller admits “I had his address in my pocket for years.” After taking the bathtub picture, Miller took a bath in the tub and slept in Hitler’s bed.
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