Lee Miller’s Photographs Captured Nazi Atrocities. Not Everyone Wanted to Look

Lee, the new blockbuster starring Kate Winslet, brings viewers into the scenes of some of the most iconic photographs from World War II.  In a masterful performance, Winslet depicts real-life photographer Elizabeth “Lee” Miller as she covers World War II and the aftermath of the Holocaust, and desperately tries to tell the world about the horror she witnessed.

The movie opens in 1937, when Lee Miller, a 30-year-old former model and artist, is lolling about on vacation in France with some of the most famous artists of the day. The film recreates the scandalous, risqué photo Lee took of the group, which remains a major work in the Surrealist movement.

Early Trauma

As the film plunges into Lee’s life on the eve of the Second World War, much of Lee’s biography is merely hinted at. Lee was born in 1907 in upstate New York.  Her father Theodore, an engineer, was an avid early photographer and taught Lee and her brothers how to take photographs and to develop pictures in a darkroom in their house.

Lee Miller modeling a bonnet-style hat by designer Rose Descat with a Weil coat, 1930.

Lee’s seemingly privileged childhood concealed horrific secrets: Lee was sexually abused by someone known to a family friend when she was seven years old and gave her gonorrhea, for which she required medical treatment. In one of Lee’s most moving scenes (spoiler alert), Lee tells her terrible story, then points out that this sort of abuse happens all the time, yet people don’t want to talk about it. Lee’s work and life can be seen as an attempt to let the world know about the horrors around us that so many of us would prefer not to confront.

Artist and Model

Lee was beautiful and talented. As a teenager, she studied theater design and lighting in Paris and dance in New York. One day, when she was 19 years old, she didn’t look as she crossed a New York City street and was nearly hit by a car.  An older man grabbed her arm and pulled her out of harm’s way.  Her savior was none other than Conde Nast, the magazine publisher who owned Vogue among other titles. He asked her to work for him; soon Lee Miller was one of the most sought-after models in all of New York.

For a decade, Lee seemed unstoppable. She moved to Paris for a time and became the muse, lover and artistic collaborator of Man Ray. Picasso painted her. She starred in the first movie that Jean Cocteau made, in 1932. Lee and her brother Erik set up their own photography studio in New York where they photographed the upper echelons of society. She began working as a photographer for Vogue as well as modeling. She married an Egyptian businessman and railroad owner and lived with him in Cairo, and traveled throughout the Middle East, taking photographs in exotic locales.

Lee Miller (center) sits among models for a spread in Vogue, 1928.

By 1939 Lee had separated from her husband and began living with the British artist Roland Penrose (whom she eventually married.)  The film Lee captures the disbelief that Lee and her artistic social circle had as they watched huge crowds cheer on the Nazis. Who could believe such nonsense, they wondered to each other? The film flashes forward to an elderly Lee being interviewed decades later: when she’s asked about the rise of Nazism, she replies that even while it was happening it didn’t seem real.

The film reflects the disbelief many are feeling today as they witness so many people embracing virulent hatred of Jews and celebrating barbaric acts unleashed by Hamas and Hezbollah.

British Vogue’s Contribution to the War Effort

For all its power, Lee has a few flaws. Lee wasn’t the only female war correspondent operating in Europe during World War II, as the movie implies (she was the only female correspondent at St Malo). Claire Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, and others also covered the war.  (The journalist Sigrid Schultz even reported from Europe for the Chicago Tribune while hiding her Jewish identity.)

More significantly, there are only two mentions of Jews as victims of the Nazis in the whole movie. In one scene, a character tells Lee that not only Jews were killed; the Nazis also murdered artists, Black people, homosexuals, Gypsies and others. I’d have liked to see Lee make it clear that Jews were the main targets of Nazi ideology and made up the vast majority of their civilian victims. (Later on, the character David E. Scherman, who was a photographer for Life magazine who collaborated with Lee during the war, mentions that the Nazi’s victims they’ve been photographing are “his” people.  Yet the movie doesn’t ever make clear that Scherman was indeed Jewish.)

Lee also doesn’t fully explain the importance that Vogue gained in Britain during World War ll.  Led by editor Audrey Withers, a left-leaning socialite who wasn’t much interested in fashion, British Vogue recast itself as a major source of information and encouragement during the war. Withers hired Lee, who reported on the war effort throughout Britain.  Lee had a nose for news, and photographed female nurses, factory workers, air raid wardens, and others. The movie recreates one of Lee’s most iconic pictures: drawing on her experience as a Surrealist artist, Lee photographed two women sitting in the entrance to a bomb shelter, wearing eye guards. It was an arresting picture, and one that helped Vogue readers feel that their experiences mattered, and that their work on behalf of the war effort was important. Work like this also made Lee a superstar; many readers felt that she uniquely understood them and was a champion for ordinary women like themselves.

War Correspondent

David Scherman encouraged Lee to become an accredited war correspondent with the US Army.  In 1944, Lee traveled to Europe, taking photos and filing copy for Vogue.  Her first assignment was simply to take photographs of nurses in an Allied field hospital in France. Lee went further, writing an article which became a major hit in Vogue both in the US and in Britain editions. Her description of what she saw was full of emotion: “For an hour or so I watched lives and limbs being saved, by skill, devotion and endurance.  Grave faces and tired feet passed up and down the tent aisles.  We discussed whether doubling the staff of doctors and nurses would relieve them of overwork - it seemed not, as everyone by his own volition would still do double his duty.”

Lee Miller, left, played by Kate Winslet, right

Lee exceeded her mandate again when she was asked to take pictures of the French town of Saint Malo, which had supposedly been liberated by Allied forces. When she arrived Lee found that Allied soldiers were still in the thick of battle against the Nazis. Even though she wasn’t meant to report on fighting, Lee provided the only photographs and press copy of the battle. Many of her photographs never saw publication: unbeknownst to her, Lee had captured the Allies’ use of napalm in the battle. Britain’s Ministry of Information censored her photos.

Documenting Nazi Atrocities

Lee covered the liberation of Paris, and one of the movie’s most interesting scenes shows a conversation Lee has with her editor over the phone.  Audrey Withers is ecstatic that Paris is free, and is celebrating with a cake at home in London. It must be like one big party, she exclaims to Lee over the phone.  Lee is beginning to realize that the Nazis deported thousands upon thousands of people. Unable to match Withers’ happy tone, she ends the call.

The movie shows Lee was looking up old friends in Paris and hearing their accounts of what befell them and their neighbors. In real life, unlike the movie, many of these friends were Jews, targeted by the Nazis because of their Jewish identity. Lee was already beginning to realize that many of her readers back home were quick to disbelief any accounts of Nazi atrocities.

In one story she filed from Paris, Lee wrote for Vogue that Jews sometimes tried to cover the yellow star they were forced to wear on their clothes with a handbag or an umbrella. “The Gestapo and SS took to grabbing away anything held to the chest of anyone. If it happened to be a Jew, he or she went straight to Drancy (the concentration camp on the edge of Paris - end of story - because from there they went to the extermination camp of Auschwitz and were probably included in the stories of people burnt alive with petrol, the starved and gas chamber victims, which I am sure you all dismiss as normal propaganda by now.”

Lee photographed the Nazi death camp Buchenwald just days after it had been liberated. It’s estimated that the Nazis imprisoned a quarter of a million people in Buchenwald; at the time of its liberation by the Allies, on April 11, 1945, over 21,000 emaciated prisoners were in the camp. Lee took photos of the stacks of bodies, and described what she saw, including torture chambers, a room where Nazis conducted gruesome medical experiments, and a massive crematorium where tens of thousands of corpses were incinerated.

“I implore you to believe this is true.”

A few weeks later, Lee met up with her old friend and colleague David Scherman, the war correspondent for Life Magazine.  Together, they were among the very first correspondents to enter the Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated.

Lee captures the site that met them: a long cattle train containing scores of cars stood motionless on the track leading into the camp.  The stench in the area was overwhelming: as Allied soldiers opened each car, the bodies of hundreds of dead people spilled out.  Lee entered one of the cars, documenting the stacks of bodies within.  Once they entered Dachau, Lee strove to capture the humanity among the emaciated victims, taking close up photos of survivors.  When she sent them back to her editor, she begged Audrey Withers, “I implore you to believe this is true.”

The movie shows what happened to Lee’s photos. Returning to England, she eagerly waited for her issue of Vogue, only to find that none of her pictures were in it. Withers explains why: people don’t want to encounter something so negative. They want to “move on.”  In the movie, Withers tells Lee that she wasn’t allowed to publish the pictures, but she sent them to Vogue in America, hoping they would use them.

In real life, British Vogue did publish some of Lee’s most hard-hitting photos, but it was American Vogue that went further. The June 1945 issue featured a spread of Lee’s photos of Buchenwald and Dachau.  The title was “Believe It.”

Later Life

Lee’s most famous photograph was taken soon after she photographed Dachau. She and Scherman were billeted in an apartment in Munich which had been seized from the Nazis.  It turned out to be Hitler’s apartment. Amazed that they were inhabiting the home of the mastermind of the horrors they were documenting, Lee and Scherman staged a photo in Hitler’s bathroom.  Lee took off her muddy combat boots, still containing the filth from Buchenwald and Dachau, and left them on Hitler’s pristine white bath mat. Then she climbed into the bath and Scherman took the photo of her scrubbing off the dirt of war.  It became an iconic image of the end of the war.

Though she continued working for Vogue for a time, Lee never recaptured the sense of purpose she seemingly felt as a war correspondent.  She and Roland Penrose eventually married, and had a son, Antony. Lee struggled with depression. In later life, she trained as a gourmet chef and enjoyed hosting lavish dinner parties for British artists.  She never told anyone about her wartime work.  Antony only discovered the thousands of wartime photos she’d taken after her death in 1977.

Lessons Today

It’s hard to walk out of Lee and not feel that the movie has an urgent message for the present day.  Lee Miller was a talented, passionate woman who worked tirelessly to document Nazi atrocities during one of the most evil chapters in the history of the world.  And yet, even though she found a measure of fame, much of her work was ignored.

She was told her testimony was too depressing, that people simply wanted to “move on” and not dwell on negative emotions.  Some doubted the veracity of what she’d witnessed.  Readers dismissed her accounts of Nazi torture and murder of Jews and others as “propaganda”.

How many times have we heard comments like this over the past year?  Today’s fanatical antisemites, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and others in their sway, tortured and murdered 1200 Jews and kidnapped over 250 on October 7, 2023, yet much of the world dismisses this fact as “propaganda.” Campuses are erupting in protests that are morally inverted, defending terrorists and rapists.

Even the events that Lee Miller documented nearly 80 years ago are being called into question; most young Americans don’t know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.  One in five young Americans believe the Holocaust never took place.  Lee’s words to Vogue “believe this” have never felt more urgent.

Featured image: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk  David E. Scherman © Courtesy Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.