Lee Miller, Kate Winslet, David E. Scherman, and Adolf Hitler

That photo again (but then again, not)

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Today’s New Yorker daily ran a story about the, yes, iconic photograph of the model-turned-photojournalist Lee Miller washing away war’s grime in Adolf Hitler's bathtub at 16 Prinzregentenplatz, Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s Munich pied-à-terre. Munich had fallen; Hitler and Braun had just killed themselves in Berlin. The war was over.

The photo (click on it for a link to the New Yorker piece) was taken on April 30th, 1945 by my father, David E. Scherman, then the 29-year-old whiz kid of LIFE magazine’s legendary photography staff. When, in 1942 in London, Miller had talked her way into covering the war for Vogue, she was already a skilled art photographer; under Scherman’s tutelage, she became an A-1 photojournalist and the two became partners, professional and otherwise. A few hours before they requisitioned Hitler’s apartment, Dave and Lee had been among the first journalists into Dachau, where 32,000 Jews died. Scherman, a Jew, was unable to work. Lee steeled herself to make her famous pictures of dying prisoners and stacked corpses. 

Not included in the New Yorker piece, and not generally known, is that after Dave snapped Lee, they switched places, and came up with a less iconic series of pictures: a clowning Dave, the original 90-pound weakling, scrubbing his hair in the tub. (See below).

The peg for the article is the upcoming movie Lee, in which Kate Winslet plays Miller and Andy Samberg my father. The movie was originally scheduled to open in January 2024, but the release has been postponed until September, catching the New Yorker with its pants down. It’s nobody’s fault but theirs—the postponement was announced months ago. Vogue was left with even more egg on its face: its humongous October 2023 cover story was about Winslet and Lee.

Photography curators and iconographers have read oodles of symbolism into the picture. The couple may indeed have intended touches like dumping Miller’s filthy boots onto Hitler’s pristine bathmat as insults to the Führer (whom they didn’t yet know was dead); indeed, the notion itself of commandeering Hitler’s inner sanctum was a slap in the face. (An exhausted Miller also took a nap on Eva Braun’s bed.) But what was really on Dave’s and Lee’s minds was more basic.

“How could you put your bare behind in Hitler’s tub?” someone asked Dave.

“We hadn’t taken our clothes off in three weeks,” Scherman said. “We stank like a bunch of polecats. Here was hot water, soap, towels, a tub. We couldn’t resist.”

When Dave and Lee drove off, Hitler’s personal Shakespeare went with them, “A.H.” and a swastika stamped in gold on every volume’s spine. I grew up with the set sitting lugubriously in the kids’ playroom in my family’s house.

A last word or two: some of you may have noticed that the photo I’ve posted is not, in fact, the Lee Miller-in-Hitler’s-tub snap; see the New Yorker article for that one (irritatingly credited as “Photograph by Lee Miller with David E. Scherman.” I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that caption, another slap in the face, which pisses me off every time (my late father didn’t enjoy seeing it either. Credit tends to flow to the famous). In any case, the picture I’ve chosen is an outtake, one that, to my eyes, serves Miller, a great beauty, somewhat better than the iconic shot itself does.

So there you have it, the backstory to one moment in a shortly-to-be-famous partnership. Below, Winslet & crew re-enact Scherman’s snap. And below that…..

Above: the past recaptured

Below: recaptured as well, Marx Brothers-style