Hello, welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, with me, Josephine

McDermott. We're going back 78 years to Munich, Germany, when the Second World War was coming

to an end. Lee Miller, one of the most remarkable female icons of the 20th century, was photographed

in the bath of Adolf Hitler. Her son, Antony Penrose, explains how. It's 1945, and over the

last six years, Germany's Nazi leader has brought the world to the brink of destruction. More than 50

million people have been killed. Lee Miller is a war correspondent for Vogue magazine. She writes

to her editor in London about the moment the Allies have been waiting for. Her words are read

by her son. For a long time, we've all speculated where we'd be, what it'd be like, and what city and

friends we'd choose in the way of celebration for the end of the war or the death of Hitler, or whatever it

was. I was living in Hitler's private apartment when his death was announced. It was midnight of

Mayday. It was snowing. We were celebrating being there anyhow, and the dry, convincing voice of the

BBC was just another vague rumor. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. Well,

all right, he was dead. He'd never really been alive for me until today. He'd been evil machine

monster all these years until I visited the places he made famous, talked to the people who knew him,

dug into back stairs, gossip, and ate and slept in his house. He became less fabulous, and therefore

more terrible. How did Lee come to be there in Hitler's apartment of all places in that historic moment?

She was born in the US in the state of New York in 1907. She started out as a model at the age of 20

in a characteristically unconventional way. She was walking through Manhattan one day, not looking

where she was going. She stepped off the pavement in front of an oncoming truck, and in that moment,

she would normally have been killed. But a man had been watching her, and he grabbed her from behind,

hauled her back onto the pavement with a split second to spare, and she fainted in his arms. The man's name

was Condennast. He was the owner of Vogue magazine and Vanity Fair. And within a few weeks, she was on

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