Restless Eye

World War II was ending in Europe, and American combat photographer Lee Miller wanted nothing more than to clean up. Miller, who was shooting for the Condé Nast magazine group, and fellow correspondent David E Scherman, with Life Magazine, had just come from hours documenting atrocities at an awful place called Dachau. Arriving in Munich, 13 miles southeast and in the throes of collapse, Miller and Scherman entered an apartment house at 16 Prinzregentenplatz. Adolf Hitler had maintained a residence at that address since the 1920s; in 1935 the dictator had bought the building, converting the sub-basement into a bomb shelter and the ground floor into quarters for bodyguards. The second floor was his private suite.

Miller and Scherman made themselves comfortable. Miller, 38, filled Hitler’s bathtub, peeled off her combat boots and fatigues, and slid into the hot water. Scherman—not only a colleague but Miller’s lover—framed a scene: the photographer bathing, in the foreground her muddy boots on a white bathmat and a kitschy replica Venus de Milo, on the tub edge a portrait of the Führer. After a while the two traded places, and Miller photographed Scherman bathing. Her picture ran in the July 1945 His didn’t. “The place was filled with mediocre, dull art,” Miller said later. Soldiers of the U.S. Army 45th Division’s 179th Regiment commandeered the flat as their command post. The GIs and the correspondents were listening to the radio that evening when the BBC reported Hitler’s suicide. A few days later Miller and Scherman accompanied Allied troops to Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. carried Miller’s images of the Berghof burning, torched by retreating SS. She recorded Germany in ruins, the aftermaths of Nazi bigwigs’ suicides, retaliatory beatings of death camp guards, and impromptu executions of former collaborators. Incongruously, amid the