The Story of Lee Miller: From the Cover of Vogue to Hitler’s Bathtub [Video]

In late-twen­ties Man­hat­tan, a nine­teen-year-old woman named Eliz­a­beth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safe­ty by none oth­er than the mag­nate Condé Nast, founder of the epony­mous pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny. Not long there­after, Miller, who’d been study­ing at the Art Stu­dents League of New York, appeared on the cov­er of Vogue. It’s tempt­ing to call this the first major episode of a charmed life, though that descrip­tor fits uneasi­ly with the arc of her sev­en­ty years, dur­ing the last few decades of which she could nev­er quite recov­er from hav­ing wit­nessed first-hand the lib­er­a­tion of the con­cen­tra­tion camps at Buchen­wald and Dachau — sights she shared with the Amer­i­can pub­lic as a war pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Miller took pic­tures of not just the con­cen­tra­tion camps, but also events like the Lon­don Blitz and the lib­er­a­tion of Paris. At the end of the war, she posed for an even more famous pic­ture…