World War II On Topic is made possible by The Herzstein Foundation.

Jennifer Putnam:
I'm Dr. Jennifer Putnam, Research Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Academy Award winner Kate Winslet stars in a new film about the life of trailblazing war correspondent Lee Miller. Miller was a true Renaissance woman. She lived many lives in many countries with many professions.

She was a model, photographer, journalist, and even a gourmet chef. But of her many lives, none was more significant than her work as a correspondent during World War II. Lee Miller's photographs of concentration camps shocked the world. The new film, called Lee, is based on the book titled The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose, who is co-director of the Lee Miller Archives and is also Lee Miller's son.

In this wide-ranging interview, Mr. Penrose talks about his mother's incredible life and the urgency and impact of her photos. Here's a brief clip.

Antony Penrose:
She climbed up into the rail cars. She clambered over the dead bodies to get the shots, and Lee was incensed. She was just so furious at what had been done to these people. And she has this sense of mission. She wants us to know what is done, what has happened. You know, it is our responsibility to never allow this happen again.

And those photographs are the evidence on which we have to act.

Jennifer Putnam:
Mr. Antony Penrose joins us now. I want to start with Lee's early life. So she experienced a very traumatizing childhood, but she really managed to reinvent herself numerous times. And in the late 1920s, when she's still a young woman, she becomes a successful model. And I think this is the first instance of Lee being in the right place at the right time.

Can you tell us a little about how she became a model?

Antony Penrose:
Well, the story goes, which is the way she told it, was that she was crossing a street in Manhattan, not looking where she was going. And she stepped out in front of a truck. And she should have been killed in that moment. But a man had been watching her, and he grabbed her. And he yanked her back onto the sidewalk, and she did the girly thing—she fainted in his arms. And he looked down and he saw exactly the face he'd been looking for, because his name was Condé Nast. He was the owner of Vogue magazine and Vanity Fair. And then she made her debut on the front cover of Vogue, March 1927.

Jennifer Putnam:
So it seems like she has kind of a short-lived modeling career. Can you tell us how it kind of came to an end in New York?

Antony Penrose:
Well, the modeling career came to an absolutely crash stop when an image of her by Steichen, Edward Steichen, was sold to an advertising agency and it appeared advertising Kotex women's sanitary products. Now, this was a really taboo subject. Nobody, no polite person ever talked about anything like this. And so for Lee to be advertising, it was scandalous. It was the first time the image of a real person had been used in association with this product.

Her modeling career absolutely died overnight because no couture house wanted the Kotex girl modeling their frocks. And she simply said, Okay, poo to you. And she boarded a liner heading for Europe with an introduction to Man Ray from Edward Steichen. Or so we believe.

Jennifer Putnam:
So just for the audience to know, Man Ray was a surrealist photographer and painter living in Paris at the time, and his work was highly sought after and really avant-garde and revolutionary. And tell us what happened.

Antony Penrose:
Well, she claimed that she arrived at Man Ray's studio and found that he wasn't there. And the concierge told her that he had gone to Tiberias for his holidays. And so she was really upset. So she walked a couple of blocks to a cafe that was called the Bateau Ivre, and which is known to be where Man Ray hung out.

And she went upstairs and she was consoling herself with a large piano. And in he comes. He hadn’t left. Not yet. And so she walks up to him and says, “Hello, I'm your new student.” And he says, “No, you're not. I don't have students in any way. I'm leaving for Biarritz for my holidays.” And she said, “Yes, I know I'm coming with you.”

And so she did.

Jennifer Putnam:
It's incredible, these little anecdotes about how Lee kind of trips and falls into these situations, but really is so persistent that she manages to kind of get the job and stick the landing. So she stays with Man Ray. She studies surrealist photography. And one of the really amazing things to come out of this era, which I think you rightly point out in the book, she doesn't get a whole lot of credit for, is being kind of the mother of solarization.

Antony Penrose:
Yes, indeed. And she was the co-inventor of it. Well, it had been invented before. It was called the Sabattier effect, but nobody really used it creatively. And so there was something that was so surrealist, so wonderful, so kind of dependent on chance as well that, they couldn't resist. It was absolutely perfect for them. And they both used it frequently for long periods afterwards.

In fact, Lee was still making solarized photographs during the war.

Jennifer Putnam:
Incredible. I think that that leads us really well into our next area of discussion, which is, Lee had so many adventures in Europe that I wish we had time to talk about. But anyone listening can read more about it in Antony Penrose's book. Lee travels around Europe. Eventually she stops working with Man Ray. They have a bit of an explosive relationship.

And she goes back to the US, starts a photography studio, and then falls in love with an Egyptian man, moves to Egypt, and then starts traveling around Europe again. And this is where she meets Roland Penrose, the surrealist artist who is from the UK, and they start traveling Europe together. It becomes clear that the war is starting, and they have to go back to the UK.

In London, it's 1939. It's clear war is coming. And Lee doesn't go back to the US, but she's warned that she should, right?

Antony Penrose:
The US embassy kept sending Lee letters saying go home immediately. And she just tore them up and threw them away. First off, she was very much in love with Roland Penrose, my father. But almost more importantly than that, she knew that it was only going to be a very short time before the whole of Europe was overrun by the Nazis, and she feared greatly for her dearest friends who were still in France.

People like Paul Eluard, Nusch Eluard, people like Man Ray, who was still there at that time, and the many, many others who we don't necessarily have names for. But they were there and they were important to her. And she knew that as soon as the Nazis moved in, they would be prime targets because they were either Jewish, they were surrealist artists, they were avant-garde, they were left wing—all of the things that the Nazis hated so much.

Jennifer Putnam:
So this is why she stays. And in England, she doesn't necessarily have a work visa. She's trying to figure out what to do, and she marches up to the headquarters at Vogue. Is that right?

Antony Penrose: 
Absolutely. She turned up at Vogue, and although she had not shot fashion for about five or six years at this point, they were immediately interested. And they took her on as a freelancer.

Jennifer Putnam:
So what kind of fashion pieces was she reporting on at the beginning of the war?

Antony Penrose: 
Well, it was very interesting because the Ministry of Information had a deal with Vogue that Vogue would get its paper rationing if they would do some useful things, like trying to convince women that joining the armed forces was a good idea, trying to convince women to wear clothing that was not likely to get caught up in the machines in the factories they were working in, trying to get women to have short hair so the hair didn't get wrenched off when they got caught up in the machine.

And all of these things we see in Lee's Vogue work, because they're these women wearing these overalls, which Lee has managed to make look really chic. And so it's some kind of high fashion, high couture thing.

Jennifer Putnam:
One of the most kind of interesting things about this period in Lee's career is that she really gets to focus on women and women who are active in society and taking on new roles. So one of the things that she works on during this time is Wrens in Camera. I should mention here as well, Wrens is women in the Royal Navy, and they were a key part of the armed forces in the UK.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Antony Penrose:
She was never trained as a journalist. She was never trained in reportage, but she just had this natural talent for being a storyteller. And when she started to tell the story of the Wrens, I expect a lot of people imagined that she would hang out with the officers and be very comfortable in the officers quarters and take photographs of, you know, very smartly dressed women doing seemingly, really responsible things.

But actually, no, she went into the workshops and she photographed the blacksmith, she photographed the women machine operators, she photographed the torpedo mechanics and the people doing really physically hard, dirty, dangerous jobs. So she was determined to give a whole profile of that, woman's services in that time. And this always happens. So when she went off to photograph the women, operating the barrage balloons, the air defense system, she was there at night while they were while they were operating the balloons and operating the searchlights and all that kind of stuff.

And actually, it was highly dangerous because the enemy air gunners used to shoot straight at the lights, and so many of those women were killed. And so Lee was right there with them, even though it wasn't combat—that didn't matter. There was still people risking their lives and doing heroic things out there on a daily basis.

Jennifer Putnam:
So during this time, she also starts collecting images for Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire. So this is, late 1940, early 1941, when the London Blitz is happening. Can you tell us a little about this book and how it got started?

Antony Penrose:
This is a very interesting little book because it was actually a propaganda exercise. America was not in the war at this point. It was 1940, 41, 42, and we were very much hoping that we could persuade you to come and help us again. And Grim Glory was mostly Lee’s photographs, taken as she wandered around London with her Rolleiflex camera.

And it really was her surrealist eye clicking in here because we see really amazing visual puns, visual jokes. So there's a totally bashed-up typewriter that is, you know, it's been pulled out from underneath some bomb wreckage somehow. And the typewriter was actually originally called Remington Silent. And she used that as the title for the image.

So we have this totally wrecked typewriter. Remington silent. Yes, it is physically silent, but that image gives you thousands of words about the destruction of war and its effect on culture. And there were always shots like that that were kind of like ironically jokey. And, you know, it's so much easier to engage people with humor. And we were trying to get, I mean, Britain was trying to get the point over to America that this is what was happening to us.

We were being bombed nightly every night for more than 30 days. If we can engage you with humor, then you are much more likely to listen to our story. Some of those photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Jennifer Putnam:
And I think she was completely successful. I mean, the book was extremely popular in America. And as well there's another image that featured on the front page of newspapers worldwide. There's that picture of the statue, with a piece of rebar across her neck.

Antony Penrose:
Yes, yes, Revenge on Culture, and there's something kind of really worrying about that. This poor lady has been crushed underneath falling masonry and so on. And again, it's a metaphor for the destruction of all the things that we really value and loved in this country.

Jennifer Putnam:
It really gets it at your heart, because it is showing you this is kind of the end of civilization, really. And this, this is war. So how does Lee transition from her work at Vogue into becoming a war correspondent for the US Army?

Antony Penrose:
The British armed forces would not allow the accreditation of women photographers and reporters. So there was a complete gender ban on women. And Lee figured out, well, actually, we think it was probably David Sherman who suggested this, that she, as a perfectly bona fide American, could become a war correspondent for the American Army. And Vogue was absolutely astonished that suddenly they found they had their very own war correspondent, who was complete with this amazing pass that allowed her to go into military areas and raring to go.

And about a month after D-Day, then she was off to Normandy to report on a field hospital just back of Omaha Beach.

Jennifer Putnam:
So I do want to talk about that, but can we just rewind a little bit and can you tell us who David E. Sherman is, and how he gets involved in Lee's life?

Antony Penrose:
It was about in 1942 that David E. Sherman, a young Life magazine reporter, arrives in Britain, and he was already a distinguished reporter, having covered the sinking of a ship that he was on called the Samson. It was sunk by a German raider, and he survived that photograph, everything that was going on, and finally made it as a Life staffer through to Britain.

And he and Lee met just to begin with, those two Yanks in Britain. Then Roland Penrose invited David Sherman to come and live in Downshire Hill in his house there that he shared with Lee, and it very quickly became a ménage à trois. They both were in love with Lee, and they both shared her. And the reason for this really was that Roland was now a captain in the British army, and he was in charge of camouflage in the Eastern Command.

That's East Anglia. And so he was away an awful lot, lecturing and preparing things and coming up with new designs and so on. And he wanted there to be somebody around Lee, who loved her as much as he did, in case those bombs should come just a bit too close one night. There would be somebody there who would go to any lengths to take care of her if something dreadful happened.

Jennifer Putnam:
That is quite sweet.

Antony Penrose:
And those two guys remained closest friends right up until my father died in 1984. And after that, David Sherman became one of the most important people I've ever had in my life. I couldn't have written the lives of Lee Miller without him.

Jennifer Putnam:
Wow, that's really incredible. So he helped you, like, gather material and told you all about their experiences together?

Antony Penrose:
Absolutely. He had this incredible memory and he could tell me dates, times, places, people's names, everything like that. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful resource. Resource for research. More importantly, though, he was by this time the editor in chief of Time-Life books. So he knew a thing or two about putting a book together, and he kind of guided me in the way I shaped it and was so encouraging and such a useful, wonderful critic. It was really amazing and just so glad that he saw the book come out and be a success and lead to all kinds of exhibitions and things of Lee's work.

Jennifer Putnam:
Okay, so let's get back to Normandy. So it's 1944. Lee sees the kind of “friendly invasion,” all of the US forces massing up in the UK. And does she know at this point she's going to be on her way to Normandy shortly after D-Day?

Antony Penrose:
I don't think anybody knew with certainty where they were going to be, but Lee was absolutely itching to get into the action wherever it may be. And when the opportunity to report on the field hospital came up, of course, she grabbed it and it took her into Normandy. And it also allowed her to prove that she could handle herself in those situations.

And that was very important. It was a kind of, almost an apprenticeship in a way. And she she got it right—she did it with great distinction. And the reportage she sent back, it was, oh, it was about 35,000 words and 40 rolls of film. And it was just so thorough and so vivid. She'd never written anything longer than a shopping list before.

And now she turns in this fabulous prose, this really epitome of good reporting: up close, personal, heartfelt, really detailed, accurate. It gives us the feeling we're there with her. And that is such a rare thing in any kind of reportage.

Jennifer Putnam:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so she goes over about a month after D-Day and her task is to create a short photo essay on nurses working in the field hospital in Normandy.

Antony Penrose:
That's right. Yes.

Jennifer Putnam:
Instead, as you said, she writes this huge report, she sends over rolls and rolls of film. And what does she really capture here?

Antony Penrose:
I think she captures the human element of it. We see a lot of the doctors, the nurses; we see a lot of the drama of the surgery. We see some of the wounded people, some who are so badly hurt they're not going to survive much longer. But we're not told that, of course. And it is very poignant because it's not about heroics, it's not about grand big things and lots of explosions and amazing machines.

It's about a human element of compassion and caring and just trying to bring some sanity and some healing into this desperate place.

Jennifer Putnam:
And it's a huge success, right? She gets a multipage spread in Vogue. The story is called “Unsung Heroes.” And how do the people at the field hospital feel about this report on their work?

Antony Penrose:
Yeah, we don't really know. But we surmise that they were very, very pleased with it. And certainly the US Army press office were pleased with the way Lee conducted herself, because they then send her on to the next assignment.

Jennifer Putnam:
So what is the next assignment?

Antony Penrose:
At that moment, they had been misinformed by intelligence. They had been informed that Saint-Malo had been taken now to a degree, this was true because the town had been taken. But unfortunately, the intelligence guys overlook the fact that it was a fortress in the harbor that's quarried into solid granite, that's bristling with guns and manned by something like 5,000 German soldiers who were very unwilling to surrender.

And they had plenty of food, plenty of water, plenty of ammunition, and they were capable of firing on just about any part of the town. So, yes, the town had been taken, it had been occupied, but it was still actually a war zone. And so when she turns up there, she finds that she's actually, in her own words, got like a medieval siege to observe.

Because the US Army was laying siege to the fortress, which is called the Cité d’Alet, and it was commanded by the German Colonel von Aulock, who had sworn to fight to the last man. And so this was a real standoff. And it was five days, and she was there very close. When they bombed the citadel, it did nothing. When they shelled it repeatedly, that didn't do much more. When they did an infantry assault—which was an absolute horrific waste of life because the soldiers were going across open ground against heavily defended fortress with machine guns dug into solid rock—they didn't stand a chance.

And then, the most extraordinary thing happened. They'd been told it was a bombing raid. She went down, close as she could get to see it. A little airplane, a very small P-38 comes in and they say, what's this? And it's coming in terribly low, and it drops a bomb, and the bomb hardly makes an explosion. There's just a flash of flame and this long column of smoke going up like a mushroom cloud. What she had witnessed was about the the third time that napalm had ever been used in combat.

And that is what hit the middle of the top of the fortress. And napalm burns so vigorously that it sucks all the oxygen out of the atmosphere. And also as a liquid, it can go down the ventilator shafts, and that is very worrying, if you happen to be sitting in a fortress that's having the oxygen sucked out of it and got fire coming down the vent shafts.

So after that, literally a few minutes after that, the white flags came out. Oh, look, [they] surrendered. And so then Lee was there, and very soon after the German soldiers had been taken away into captivity, she writes, “The war left me and Saint-Malo behind.”

Jennifer Putnam:
So there's two really extraordinary things I want to talk about in this story. One is what happens to those photos that she took of one of the first uses of napalm?

Antony Penrose:
Well, the photographs were sent back to Vogue magazine, and they printed them. And as they had to, they sent them off to the censor and the censor passed it, sent the photographs back to Vogue, and Vogue were on the edge of running it, when suddenly all hell broke loose and they came back and they grabbed the photos, and they put a total absolute embargo on the ones of what we now know to be napalm, because it was still a top secret weapon.

And of course, if it had been published in the pages of Vogue, anybody knowing anything about explosives would know that that was not a normal bomb from the way it exploded. So anyway, the extraordinary thing was that, oh, I guess it must have been about 15 years ago by a complete fluke, we've got the [photos] back from the censor, through Vogue.

And that was sort of like signing off the negatives has stayed with us over all that time. But we got the prints back.

Jennifer Putnam:
I can't believe they weren't destroyed. That's really amazing. So the other thing I want to talk about here is we got some really amazing photos of Andreas von Aulock surrendering, and then she gets picked up by the press office, doesn't she?

Antony Penrose:
Yes. The press office were not impressed with Lee's heroics, because she had violated the terms of her accreditation. So they grabbed her and they put her under house arrest in Rennes, which is, you know, a few 40 miles inland, I guess. And this was actually a blessing in disguise, because by this time she was utterly exhausted, and she really was forced to sit down and get on with writing her story.

And this she did. And so that's how she wrote that amazing piece, “The Siege of Saint-Malo,” which Vogue published. And it is one of the most compelling pieces of war writing ever known. And that's not just my opinion. People who really know what they're talking about will tell you that.

Jennifer Putnam:
It is a really incredible story, and I think one of the things to talk about here is women weren't allowed to report on combat. So women war correspondents are barred from reporting on combat. And Lee, when she gets to Saint-Malo, she knows she's the only journalist there. She's got the scoop of the century. So she's got to take the chance.

And you know, the great irony of the press office sending her to cover Saint-Malo and then arresting her for having done what she was supposed to, it's just a great story and, again, shows Lee's adaptability in being able to say, Okay, I'm on house arrest. I'm going to use this time to write the report and catch up on sleep and get ready for my next assignment.

So our next assignment is Liberation of Paris, and she covers the fashion, she covers people still fighting in the streets. And she goes to check in on her old friends, right?

Antony Penrose:
Yes. Well, she gets to Paris a few days after the whole beginning of the liberation, because she'd still been under arrest in Rennes. And that's kind of like, spoiled the timing for arriving in Paris. But when she did get there, of course, she knew things that the other journalists didn't. So she knew where to find Picasso, and she knew where to find Jean Cocteau, and she knew where to find other artists, people who had survived that terrible period. And so she went round to their places and she photographed them.

And she also knew very intimately the people at Vogue magazine, and of course, straight away she was a tremendous asset to them to help get Vogue back on its feet, because they had decided not to publish during the occupation. And so they had to get going from a kind of standing start. And Lee was instrumental in all of that.

Jennifer Putnam:
But despite all this, as you said before, Lee feels like the war has left her behind, right? So she doesn't want to stay in Paris. She wants to get back where the action is. How does she do that?

Antony Penrose:
Well, there's quite a lot of pressure on her, not only from Vogue, but also from Roland Penrose and so on, to stay in Paris. And she wasn't going to do that. And one of the things that motivated her was that so many of her friends were missing—tens of thousands of Jewish people who had been rounded up by the Nazis and taken from Paris and other parts of France and taken away, and nobody knew where they'd gone, although there was a few ideas emerging, nobody really understood.

The hope was they would be all found in labor camps and repatriation. But Lee was determined to find out what had happened, and so she pushed on ahead in the winter of ’44–’45, which was some of the coldest and most bitter fighting of the whole war. She was in Alsace, just 100 miles away or so. The Battle of the Bulge was going on.

There was intense fighting in that area. And then in the early spring, the Allies kicked their way into Germany and Lee was there. She was there in Aachen, Cologne, and places like that. And she was still looking, wondering what had happened to all those missing people. And then she gets to the first of the concentration camps, which we think was Ohrdruf, then Penig, then Buchenwald, and then Dachau.

And then she knew within and without any doubt at all, that her missing friends were just not going to come home. And when she saw what had happened there, I think that was the most incredible blow to her. But she kept on photographing. She kept on reporting. She wanted the world to know what had happened.

Jennifer Putnam:
So let's talk about her first experience with one of the camps. So she is traveling with David Sherman. They reconnected in Paris and started traveling together, and then she catches wind of a place called Buchenwald and that it's being liberated. So she hitches a ride, gets in a jeep and makes her way there, a few days after it's liberated. Can you tell us what this was like for her?

Antony Penrose:
Buchenwald had been liberated about four or five days earlier, so a bit of clearing up had happened, but there was still many of those grim piles of emaciated bodies. There was still people that had been tortured to death. There was still the signs of the atrocities that had happened, but it wasn't quite as in-your-face as Dachau was, because she arrived in Dachau the morning after it had been taken the night before. The Americans arrived that evening, there was a firefight, but they weren't going to let any journalists or anybody else into the camp until light the following day.

So that's when Lee and Sherman showed up.

Jennifer Putnam:
So let's talk about Dachau, because this was obviously an extremely traumatic experience for Lee and really for everyone involved in the liberation of the camp. So the 42nd and the 45th Infantry Divisions had come into the camp the night before. There had been a firefight, and when the camp was liberated; several of the guards were killed, both by US soldiers and by prisoners in the camp.

So as she comes in, she can see these train cars full of prisoners' bodies, but also the scattered remains of SS guards from the camp. And she has these really striking images of walking into Dachau. And did she interact with the prisoners? Did she get a sense of, kind of, what they had been through?

Antony Penrose:
I think she did interact with them, indeed, and certainly physically, because I know that she—Sherman told me she made the mistake of getting a candy bar out and giving it to one guy. And of course, it was an absolute melee as everybody else wanted one too, and, you know, so in the end, they had to be very careful what they did and how they behave.

And when she was photographing that train, she showed just the most incredible courage because the train had left Buchenwald 30 days earlier, and it had been loaded with 3,102 prisoners. And it was... There was only one survivor when the GIs took the camp; all the rest had died of thirst, of starvation, of exposure, of disease. In every single case, it was murder because they were all unarmed civilian prisoners.

And Lee was incensed. Sherman said that she was going around encased in an ice cold rage. She was just so furious at what had been done to these people. And she has this sense of mission. She wants us to know what was done, what has happened. You know, it is our responsibility to never allow this happen again. And those photographs of the evidence on which we have to act.

So she climbed up into the railcars. She clambered over the dead bodies to get the shots. She takes a picture of some dead people in the crowd car, with the couple of GI medics looking on in absolute horror, and the piles and piles of bodies inside the crematorium because it's run out of coal, was not enough coal to incinerate the bodies, and the—just everything that she saw, she photographed. And she's given that to us as her evidence today.

Jennifer Putnam:
I think what you said earlier about how these photos are so humanizing, she... I think this is her ethos throughout her entire photography. And she really brings us to the camps as well. When she's photographing prisoners, you can see that she's searching in their faces for something and she's trying to show their humanity and that they are still people and still dignified.

And, there's a great anecdote in your book about when Lee and David Sherman ask to photograph a bunk in one of the barracks and the prisoners—you can tell the rest of this story.

Antony Penrose:
Well, they piled into the bunk, and, and they all sort of sat there grinning away, like lying there in their bunks. It was three-tier bunks made of wood, and at the end one of them didn't move. They died, and they just dragged him out, stripped his clothes off, flung him on the heap outside. This had become so commonplace to them that it was barely remarkable for them.

But of course, for Sherman and Miller it was another real, real blow, a real assault on their senses to see almost how casually this had been accepted by the man's fellows.

Jennifer Putnam: 
It's such a somber experience to read about this, and I think one of the incredible things about Lee is her strength to endure while she's doing the assignment. So a lot of other journalists stopped reporting on the camps partway through because they grew ill. They started crying. They couldn't carry on. And Lee has this remarkable ability throughout her career to keep going until the job is done and then collapses once the job has been completed.

Was this the case with the camps?

Antony Penrose:
It was the case with all of her war experiences. She repressed the trauma, which in many ways was just postponing it, because I think we all understand now that a repressed trauma just gets worse and stronger and more vicious as time goes on. But at that moment, she felt a duty not to break down, not to give in to her feelings.

She determined to press on because she felt this sense of mission about telling everybody what she had seen, and that really surmounted everything. So yes, she postponed the awful reckoning, and that hit her very, very hard in the postwar years. And it made her into an alcoholic and depressive. And so the first 25 years of my life was spent with her being quite severely affected by alcohol, very erratic, very temperamental—quite, you know, somebody described as being way beyond difficult. And she often was. And that was, I think, really the aftershock of everything that she had seen.

Jennifer Putnam:
Absolutely. So when they leave the show and they're headed back to Munich, Lee sends her report to editor Audrey Withers at Vogue. And she says, in all caps, “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE!” Was this the concern that Lee had that people wouldn't believe these images in this report already?

Antony Penrose:
There was, in quite a subtle way, propaganda going about that. This was a hideous stunt, faked by the Allies to, you know, to discredit the Nazis, and so on. And I still get this today, and I love meeting Holocaust deniers because I have a great many images that tells us all that, yes, it really did happen.

And if those images are fake, then that's implying that my mother is a liar and is also implying that David E. Sherman is a liar. And I know that neither of those two people could have faked that truth.

Jennifer Putnam:
So powerful. So going back to Lee's report on the concentration camps, she writes up this report for Vogue and it's unflinching. She goes through all of the details. She contrasts images of peaceful German children with the concentration camps and what's happening to these prisoners. Does this become widespread immediately? These photos are so iconic now.

Were they in their time?

Antony Penrose: 
No, they weren't. And this was something that caused Lee a great deal of anguish. You remember the line to Audrey Withers, “I implore you to believe this is true.” Well, when Lee got back to England, she found that Vogue had not printed the images of the Holocaust. American Vogue had. The American Vogue made a fantastic spread on it... Very bold, very brave.

But in Britain, where they had five years of war, everybody was exhausted. Nobody wanted another magazine full of horror. They wanted to look forward to peacetime and to people coming home from the wars and for the whole country to start being rebuilt and mended. They didn't want to look back on those images. In later life Audrey Withers said that she—that was the Vogue editor, Audrey Withers—said that she regretted not publishing those images, but at the same time she felt that in the situation, it was right to move on in that moment rather than look back.

It's a very difficult decision for her to have made, and certainly it was one that upset Lee because she took those pictures because she wanted everybody to see them, and indeed, in a way that wishes become true because with the ascendancy of Lee's elevation, the fact that she's so widely now known, now that wish of everybody seeing those pictures is beginning to be a reality.

Jennifer Putnam:
Lee takes the more incredibly iconic photos after they leave Dachau. So Lee and David E. Sherman billet with the 45th Infantry Division at 16 Prinzregentenstraße in Munich. Why is this building special?

Antony Penrose:
This address was actually Hitler's apartment in Munich, and they knew of it because they had been tipped off by the Signal Corps. And the Signal Corps knew this because all the phone lines were routed into that building. It was the headquarters of the communications and signal was really get off and phone lines. So they wanted to repurpose them for their own needs.

And so they'd taken the place over and they said to Lee and Sherman, okay, if you get down there, you know, the guys will let you in, and they did. They got in and they found the place full of US personnel, who had taken it over and, you know, connecting into the phone network. And the reason that it was so special for them was that there was sort of stuff to eat, there was alcohol, there was all kinds of things. And it was warm and there was hot water, because we're told it was probably one of the only places in Munich that still had coal, and therefore there was hot water, and there was a bath and there was soap and there were towels.

And I think you probably know by now that Lee hops into the bath and has a scrub. And Sherman was there and he took her picture. And I said to him, “Wasn't it creepy getting into Hitler's bath?”—because he hops in after Lee—and he said, “My boy, we stink like polecats. We hadn't had our clothes off in three weeks. Here was hot water. Here was soap, here was towels. We just could not resist it.”

And he said, “Then we realized that we had a scoop.” So they put the photograph on the back edge of the bath. That's the photograph—a vanity portrait of Hitler by his revolting pet photographer called Heinrich Hoffmann—and it was on the posters all the way across Nazi Germany and German occupied territories with the slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, tolles Deutschland, which is “One people, one nation, one leader, great Germany.” So anyway, they took the photograph. Lee Miller hops out and Sherman gets in. But the key to that image is to look at the bathmat, because Lee has tramped the filth of Dachau into that nice clean bathmat.

And for me, this is metaphorically like she's grinding her heel into Hitler's face because it was like that, that private, that pristine place, and she's just grinding Dachau into it. And what she didn't know, and Sherman and nobody else had any way of understanding, was that at 4:45 that afternoon, way across Germany, in Berlin, Hitler and even Braun just finished killing themselves.

And so in that moment, there are these huge circles closing—the circle of the war, the circle of Lee's career as a combat journalist, the circle of her relationship with Sherman—and other circles were opening. Those circles bring us here today in this conversation, because Lee's work is still out there and still making a difference and telling us things we need to know.

Jennifer Putnam:
And so where do they go after Munich? I mean, how can you top getting these incredible photos in Hitler's apartment on the day that he dies?

Antony Penrose:
They topped it quite simply by going into Obersalzberg, where there was Hitler's house, Wachenfeld, which was dug into the side of a mountain that was practically honeycombed into a fortress, an impregnable fortress. But when they got there, the RAF [Royal Air Force] bombed it, and it was all knocked about. One of the buildings was on fire, set fire to by the SS.

Everybody had fled, and Lee and Sherman took a picture which they say captured the funeral pyre of the Third Reich. And as Hitler's house blazing away, and Sherman standing right up close to it with a flash gun to illuminate the side of the house and Lee's back up the hillside, taking the shot. And that was kind of like signing off, if you like, because the war ended a few days later.

And that indeed was the beginning of a whole new era of Lee's life.

Jennifer Putnam:
So can you tell us a little bit about that era? I know David Sherman goes back to the US, and Roland is begging Lee to come home, but she doesn't.

Antony Penrose:
Well, she first of all went into Denmark to photograph the celebrations of the Danish liberation. And then she traveled very quickly back on herself through Paris, into Vienna and in Vienna. She photographed the burned-out opera house with the opera singer, Irmgard Seefried, singing an aria on the stage. She photographed all kinds of stuff the, you know, the damage from the fighting.

But the most important thing that she did was, she went to the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital, and then she photographed the babies who were dying because the black marketeers had stolen all the drugs. You may know of a movie called The Third Man. Well, that's based on fact. And that's exactly what was happening. Then the black market racketeers had stolen the drugs, sell them to other people, and the children in the hospital were dying.

And Lee started her piece to Vogue magazine, “For an hour. I watched a baby die,” and it goes on like that, and she's photographed these kids dying, and she's photographed the futile attempts of the nurses to try and keep them alive and save their lives. And for her, something died in her at that moment, because I think the brave new world that she wanted, that was going to be fair and full of good things for everybody, had just not been delivered.

There were still crooks doing terrible things, there were still politicians being venal and vile. And what had happened? Why had everybody died? Why had most of Europe been smashed flat? There was no gain. There was no advantage, especially for vulnerable little people like these kids.

And then she went on from there. She went on to Hungary, to Budapest. And then she went into Romania. And all the time she was just looking, looking, looking for something that made sense, something that was a reward for all the suffering. But all she found was people suffering trials of refugees, starvation, you know, and awful kinds of political maneuvers that were resulting in the wrong kinds of people getting back into power and that kind of thing.

And she was just so bitterly disillusioned. And she went back to Paris. Roland had heard she was there, traveled over, grabbed her, and brought her back to England. And from what I can understand, she was pretty much a basket case by that time. She was really physically ill, her gums were bleeding. She was white as a sheet. She was just—absolutely had it mentally and physically.

And he kind of like coaxed her back into the world. He was no psychiatrist, he was no nurse. But he was a very intuitive and very caring person. And I think and I'd like to think that he rescued her in that moment.

Jennifer Putnam:
And so she goes back to the UK and after some much needed rest and recovery, she does start picking up Vogue assignments again, right?

Antony Penrose:
Yes. Well, she did a kind of valedictory tour in the United States, going to American Vogue and so on, and then visiting people like Max Ernst in Arizona and Man Ray in Los Angeles. And then she started to pick up various assignments back in England. But the trouble was, it was all a bit dull, photographing frocks and handbags after what she had seen.

And also the alcohol, the awful demons from post-traumatic stress disorder were beginning to torment. And even though Audrey Withers was as kind and as helpful and supportive as she could have been, it was just not working. Lee couldn't deliver on time. When she did do an assignment, it was good, but it didn't have that kind of particular flair to it that she was used to have in the past.

And in the end, I think it was 1954, she did her last article, which she called “Working Guests.” It's all about people at Farleys Farm in Sussex, and they were hanging around and having a great time and helping to fix up the house and things like that. And actually that was the last time she wrote and photographed for Vogue.

She was back in Vogue a few decades later when she reinvented herself as a gourmet cook. She became a kind of celebrity chef, and she was written up in Vogue and House & Garden and other posh magazines. And actually, that was her way out of depression and alcohol abuse. She cooked her way out of it.

Jennifer Putnam:
So by the time you got to know your mom, she was a different woman. She was a gourmet chef. She was a mother. She was Roland Penrose's wife. How did you get to know this fascinating history that your mother had?

Antony Penrose:
I knew nothing of her war work. I mean, she'd only talk to me about the war maybe about four times. Then I'm sure she died literally about less than a week or a week later. My late wife, Susanna, was looking for some baby pictures of me because we just had our firstborn baby daughter called Amy, and she wanted to see what I looked like as a baby.

And so Patsy, our old housekeeper, said, “You better go and look in the attic. There's some stuff there. You know, some photos there, it might be, might be what you want.” And Susanna didn't come down with photographs. She came down with a manuscript. And Susanna had known how bitter and difficult things had been between me and my mum.

And she said to me, “I think you should read this.” And actually the manuscript was “The Siege of Saint-Malo” and the pages were all jumbled up. I started reading in the middle of a page and it was “machine gun fire belched from the end pillbox,” and I thought, What? And I read it. And then I sorted all the pages out and I read it again.

It was this incredible piece of writing so involved, so well-observed, so personal and close. And I thought, Well, who wrote this? It must be some hot-shot Life magazine guy. And my dad answered that he went and he found an old back number of Vogue. And there it was, “The Siege of Saint-Malo” by Vogue's own war correspondent, Lee Miller.

They had, throughout the fighting, and I didn't quite realize how huge that was in that moment, but it was a life changing moment because Susanna and I dragged everything out of that attic. There was something like 60,000 photographs. There were 20,000 vintage prints. There were probably around 30,000 pages of manuscript, and we just worked on them. And that began the Lee Miller Archive with Susanna, a former ballet teacher, and me, a dairy farmer, overnight, becoming photographic archivists.

Jennifer Putnam:
And now Amy is involved. How do you think Lee would feel about this being kind of a family affair?

Antony Penrose:
I think Lee would be absolutely thrilled to have Amy's involvement in the archive, and Amy and I co-directors, and really, she is so valuable in making the whole thing work. She's a very good businesswoman. She's a very imaginative person in terms of, what are we going to do next? And really, I think it's fantastic that this is still a family business, if you like.

I mean, I always used to joke that I turned my dead mother into a cottage industry, and now the joke is I've turned my dead mother into a global brand. And Amy is very much part of making that what it is today.

Jennifer Putnam:
Well, and part of that is this new movie that's coming out. How much involvement did you guys have with the creation of Lee?

Antony Penrose:
We had a lot of involvement, because that's the way that Kate Winslet and the producers work on this. We were getting on fine. We had an Australian producer, called Troy Lamb, and then I think it was 2014, Kate meets Troy and says that she wants to be Lee Miller, and Troy says, kind of, Yep, I think that's a good idea.

And after that, and so eventually, well quite quickly Kate becomes a producer. And then that's when stuff really started to happen, because she came to the archive and she spent days there looking at photos, reading manuscripts, asking questions. She would come to... We do some theater performances as well. She would come to our performances. She would come to exhibitions that we had, of Lee's work in the Imperial War Museum and that kind of stuff.

And, it was, she was just absorbing everything that she could about Lee. And she created the personality of Lee, not so much from things that I had told her, but from what she intuited, from reading the manuscripts, the letters, the diaries, seeing the photographs, looking at these things and thinking to herself, what kind of person would write like this? What kind of person would take that picture? And that's how she built up the character and the result being that when I saw her on the screen as Lee, it was such a perfect match. That at one point we see her, just about the moment that she dies, and she's an old woman at home at Farleys Farmhouse. And for me, it was devastating because I thought it was, somehow, it was for real.

They filmed her. She's you know... What’s she done? Come back to life. How did they, how did they do that? Because it was so convincing, was so perfectly accurate. Not only the appearance, which is spot on, but the manner of speaking, the accent, the delivery, the kind of gravelly way that she would put a point over. It was just perfect.

Jennifer Putnam:
If there was one thing you wanted people to take away from Lee's complicated and fascinating story, what would it be?

Antony Penrose:
The one takeaway of Lee's work is particularly relevant to women and young women, because she's speaking to you. To say, follow your dreams, do it. Don't let anybody say that you can't do it. Don't let people stand in your way. If you want to be something, go off and do it. That is the message. The most rewarding thing about all of this is that I often get usually young women, but sometimes not so young, coming to me and saying, “I owe Lee Miller a debt, because she inspired me to...” And then it goes. Dump a toxic relationship. Get out of a boring job, follow my career. And sometimes it's... Go off and become a combat photographer. Not too often, I hope. That occurs because it's a very dangerous occupation, but this has happened more than once, and she has been the inspiration for a lot of women doing a lot of exciting and important things.

And that is what makes me really proud.

Jennifer Putnam:
That has touched my heart. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Antony. The film Lee is in theaters now, and the book The Lives of Lee Miller is a fascinating, detailed look into her life. You can also check out our articles on The National WWII Museum’s website on Lee Miller's wartime experiences.

And as always, be sure to plan a visit to The National WWII Museum here in New Orleans.