Lee Miller, Kate Winslet and David E. Scherman

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.