On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. That same day, hundreds of miles away in Munich, two photographers walked into his private apartment and did something that would produce some of the most striking images of the entire war. They took a bath in his tub.
The two photographers were Lee Miller and David E. Scherman. Miller was no ordinary wartime correspondent. She had started her career as a highly sought-after model in New York before training as a professional photographer in Paris. By the time World War II broke out, she was working as a photojournalist, embedding with Allied forces and documenting the war from the front lines. Scherman was a staff photographer for Life magazine and one of Miller’s closest colleagues. Together, they covered some of the war’s most brutal chapters.
The day before they entered Hitler’s apartment, Miller and Scherman had been at Dachau. The Nazi concentration camp, located just outside Munich, had been liberated by American forces on April 29, 1945. What they saw there was catastrophic — emaciated survivors, piles of dead prisoners, and the physical machinery of mass murder. Miller photographed all of it. She sent her images and dispatches directly to Vogue magazine, which published them, shocking readers who had no idea of the camp’s true conditions.
After Dachau, Miller and Scherman made their way into Munich as Allied forces secured the city. When word reached them that Hitler had died and that his personal apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz was accessible, they went. The apartment was a well-known symbol of Nazi authority — Hitler had used it as his primary Munich residence throughout his rise to power and beyond.
Inside, they found the apartment largely intact. They moved through the rooms and eventually reached Hitler’s private bathroom. That’s where they set up the shoot. Miller went first. She stepped into the bathtub fully, and Scherman photographed her. In the most well-known image from the session, Miller sits in the tub, her gaze directed upward and slightly away from the camera. Her expression is calm but distant — the look of someone carrying a heavy mental load. On the floor beside the tub sit her mud-caked combat boots, the same ones she had worn through Dachau hours earlier.
A framed portrait of Hitler sits on the edge of the tub, visible in the background of the frame. The placement is deliberate. The dirt from a Nazi concentration camp, carried in on Miller’s boots, now sits on the bathmat of the man who ordered those camps built. Years later, Miller summed it up herself: “I washed the dirt of Dachau off in his tub.”
Scherman also got into the tub for his own set of photos. The tone of his images is noticeably different. He’s photographed lathering his hair, more relaxed and even playful. In his version of the shot, Hitler’s portrait is still visible but partially obscured by a soap dish sitting in front of it — the Führer literally pushed to the side by an ordinary bathroom object.
The apartment itself told its own story. Personal items still filled the rooms. Sculptures, books, and decorative objects that Hitler had chosen remained in place. The two photographers moved through the space and documented what they found, shooting not just the bathroom but the broader environment of a man who had just lost everything — and taken millions of others down with him.
The bathtub photos carried real weight precisely because of the timing. April 30, 1945 was the day of Hitler’s death. The war in Europe would be over in eight days. The images of Miller in that tub, boots from Dachau resting on the bathmat, captured the collision of two worlds — the depths of Nazi atrocity and the moment of its total collapse.
Miller’s work throughout the war had been relentless. She photographed the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Saint-Malo, the death camps, and now the private bathroom of the man responsible for it all. Her images from 1944 and 1945 rank among the most important documentary photographs produced by any journalist during World War II.
Scherman’s role in the bathtub session is sometimes overlooked, but he was the one behind the camera for Miller’s most famous shot. The two trusted each other completely, which is why the photos work. There’s no performance anxiety in Miller’s face — only exhaustion and something harder to name.
The boots in the photograph have drawn attention from historians for decades. They are not a prop. They are the actual boots Miller wore into Dachau. The mud on them came from the grounds of a place where hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned and tens of thousands died. That detail turns a provocative photo into a document.
