As a war photographer, Miller was constantly pushing limits – getting to the site faster, before anyone else, and getting there alone. As a female photographer working for Vogue, Miller was transforming a fashion magazine into a current events war journal, opening up women in America to the brutal sights of the war with fresh eyes.
She set out in Europe, capturing the siege of Saint-Malo and the liberation of Paris. Then, accompanied by a fellow photographer, David E. Scherman, she was one of the first photographers to enter the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. On the day of the liberation of the camps on April 30, 1945, and the same day Hitler commited suicide in his Berlin bunker, Miller and Scherman snuck into Hitler’s abandoned Munich home. It was there that Scherman took the photograph, Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub.