David E. Scherman

1936-1972

American (New York)

David E. Scherman (1916-1997) was born in Manhattan and raised in New Rochelle, New York. After graduating from college in 1936 from Dartmouth, he purchased a Leica camera and submitted a portfolio of work to LIFE Magazine. He was hired as a copy boy, then became a staff photographer and later, an editor. He was the only photographer to become an editor in LIFE's history. He retired from the magazine when it closed in 1972.

He was well-known for his World War II reportage; he and fellow photojournalist Lee Miller (for Vogue) documented the atrocities at Buchenwald and Dachau. On the day that Adolph Hitler killed himself, he and Miller phtoographed each other bathing in Hitler's Munich apartment, and Scherman's photograph of Miller became his controversial best-known work.

Following World War II, Scherman returned to the United States and began work on a book, Literary America, with his wife Rosemarie Redlich. In 1951, he was assigned by LIFE to work with Mildred Bennett on a photo essay about the settings of Willa Cather's novels.