Secret behind the photo The Woman in Hitler's Bathtub by Lee Miller With this black and white photograph of a beautiful woman in a bathtub, the look a little lost, a little vague, it would almost look like a Hitchcock movie... The tension is palpable and yet you will see that here reality exceeds fiction. This beautiful American is Lee Miller. First a model for Vogue magazine, she came to Paris where she met the surrealist photographer Man Ray. She becomes his muse but also trains in photography with the master. She takes surreal and fashion photography for British Vogue. During the Second World War, she became a war photographer for Vogue. With David Scherman, she follows the American army. She thus participated in the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau camps, whose horror she immortalized in striking shots. In April 1945, a few hours after their visit to Dachau, David and Lee arrived... in Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich. They will spend a few days there. Discovering the immaculate bathroom, Lee Miller has the idea of this shot that she stages, asking David Sherman to photograph her. That day, they just learned, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. The gaze lost probably still in the death camps, she washes herself of the horrors she witnessed under the very eyes of the one who perpetrated them. Look at the portrait of the Führer, ridiculously small, placed on the left on the edge of the bathtub. On the floor, the boots are soiled with mud, Dachau's mud, the white carpet. This staging, in which the shower head is highlighted behind Lee, is reminiscent of that, macabre, of the concentration camps where the ceilings of the gas chambers were equipped with shower heads, connected to nothing, to make the prisoners believe that they were going to wash. In this shot, the bathroom, bursting with whiteness, and the naked woman statuette on the right denounce Hitler's hygienist theories, the cult of the perfect and vigorous body. Lee Miller takes possession of the place, signifying the end of an era. Traumatized by everything she saw, Lee Miller gradually abandoned photography and plunged into depression and alcohol.