War Can Feel Surreal. See How This American Photojournalist Captured the Horrors—and Dark Humor—of World War II

A rediscovered scrapbook showcases never-before-seen images by Lee Miller, a war correspondent for British “Vogue” who followed American troops through Europe

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

April 14, 2026

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On April 30, 1945, the day Adolf Hitler killed himself, photographer Lee Miller took a bath in his bathtub. She and her lover, David Scherman, a fellow war correspondent, had entered Hitler’s abandoned apartment in Munich. They arranged a composition, and Scherman snapped the photo: Miller in the bath—a portrait of the Führer behind her—casually holding a washcloth to her shoulder.

“I think she was sticking two fingers up at Hitler,” Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, told the Telegraph’s Pat Parker in 2014.

Hours before entering Hitler’s apartment, Miller had visited the newly liberated concentration camp Dachau. “On the floor are her boots, covered with the filth of Dachau, which she has trodden all over Hitler’s bathroom floor,” Penrose added. “She is saying she is the victor.”

The photo became a symbol of World War II’s European conclusion. It also helped cement Miller’s multifaceted reputation. She was, at the time, employed as a war correspondent for British Vogue. Simultaneously, she was a Surrealist artist, a model and a provocateur.

Now, a scrapbook filled with some of Miller’s unpublished war-era photos—as well as those by her colleague, British photographer Cecil Beaton—has emerged from a private collection in England.

British Vogue darkroom assistant Roland Haupt assembled the book of images and handwritten annotations between 1943 and 1949. It remained in private hands for more than 75 years, until his descendants decided recently to sell it to the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries.

For Haupt, the book had personal significance. “This is the story of my favorite photographer, Lee Miller,” he wrote in the album, by way of introduction.

But for historians and the art world, the book offers broader value. It contains haunting photos of Nazi death camps, celebrity photoshoots and even a second version of the bathtub photograph.

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“There are lots of pictures I have never seen before,” photography dealer Michael Hoppen, who brokered the sale, tells the London Times’ David Sanderson. “There are pictures of the concentration camps that I’m glad I don’t remember and others of executions where you have the full set of pictures. It is clearly a very personal album.”

Miller, born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, studied theater, dance and the arts. She entered the media world as a model, even appearing on the cover of Vogue after meeting publisher Condé Nast. She met famous artists, including Beaton, while doing that work.

When Miller moved to Paris in 1929, she entered the world of Surrealism. There, she formed a collaborative relationship with the American artist Man Ray, who immortalized her lips and eye in art, reported Smithsonian magazine’s Eli Wizevich in 2024. Miller began making her own work, including Surrealist photos of Parisian street scenes and experimental studio images. She continued with photography through moves to New York, Cairo and London.

British Vogue hired Miller as a freelancer in 1940, and its publisher made her an accredited U.S. Army war correspondent in 1942. As Miller traveled Europe taking photographs, she retained her unique artistic lens. One of her images, for example, shows a nurse framed by two drying racks from which gloves hang like “disembodied hands,” per Smithsonian.

“I’ve often said that I feel the only meaningful training for being a war correspondent is first of all to be a Surrealist, because then nothing is too unusual,” Penrose told Smithsonian.

Haupt’s scrapbook features a photo of Miller, clad in her correspondent’s uniform, talking to Pablo Picasso at his studio in Paris. “I was with the first American troops in the liberation of Paris and the first thing I did was to go to see my old friend Picasso,” Miller once recalled, as Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson reported in 2023. “Picasso always said I was the first American soldier he saw.”

While much of the scrapbook is populated with violent shots—like photos of firing squads and captured Nazi guards—it also includes pictures of glamorous celebrities like Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire and Bob Hope. One posed portrait in the book, similar in tone to the famous bathtub shot, shows a man lying in Hitler’s wife’s bed, reading Mein Kampf.

Haupt’s rediscovered photo book is only the latest development in a recent revival of Miller’s artistic legacy. In 2023, Kate Winslet portrayed Miller in the film Lee. The photographer has also been the subject of multiple recent museum exhibitions, including shows at the Dalí Museum in Florida and the Tate Britain in London.

“Equally unconventional and ambitious, Lee Miller continually reinvented herself, much like the artists she lived among and photographed,” said Hank Hine, the Dalí Museum’s executive director, in a 2020 statement. “With a wry Surrealist quality, her work intimately captured a range of people and historical moments; however, the passion, intensity and restlessness of the woman behind the camera is where the most extraordinary stories can be told.”

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Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.