I must be on a Nazi grand tour. After reading Slaughterhouse Five and then Woman at 1,000 Degrees, both of which deal with Nazi atrocities and how they affected the individual lives of innocent contemporaries, I now watched Lee, a biopic about the war correspondent Lee Miller, starring Kate Winslet.

Lee Miller was an American fashion model who eventually became a photographer. Before World War II she was in France working for Vogue magazine. As Germany occupied France and Paris, she asked to be sent to the front lines as a war correspondent. As she followed the action, she came in contact with the local populations, including the innocent women and children. What she saw compelled her to tell the story in pictures, and she quickly made a name for herself. Eventually she ended up at the Dachau concentration camp at the time of the liberation by the Americans and there she witnessed the full impact of the Holocaust. Ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome for pretty much the rest of her life, she was not a very happy or successful mother to her only son, Antony. She said she did the best she could.

Antony never knew his mother’s past and legacy. He only discovered her documents, her photographs and mementos after she had died in July 1977. He documented her life and wrote her biography, which became the basis for the movie.

Lee is not a feel-good movie. It’s hard to follow at times, especially in the beginning. But it builds, and without sensationalizing war, without explicit battle scenes, it tells a story of great suffering and immense evil. And in these times, where dictatorships seem to be in vogue again – pun intended – Lee is a good movie to watch to remind yourself about what happens when one group of people suddenly decides to give one person the power to persecute and harm entire populations of others they don’t understand and therefore they don’t like.