I very much doubt that the chimneys in the background belong to a Krema building. To see why, it would help to look at a better (uncropped) version of the picture:
Source:
http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1144233 (This page has extra details about the provenance of the picture, btw.)
In the uncropped photo, it's clear that the barracks in the foreground are viewed end-on, as can be seen in particular at the right-hand edge of the frame. But that would mean, for the picture to make sense, that the cameraman would have to be standing behind at least one row of barracks, and shooting along their length towards the chimneys. Using Google Maps, then, we can locate the closest possible point for the shot:
From there to the chimneys of Krema 4 would have been a little over 120 meters:
But as Carolyn's text implies in mentioning Kremas 2, 3 and 5--but
not 4--as having been allegedly destroyed in January 1945, that wouldn't make sense since Krema 4 almost certainly had been demolished much earlier, in autumn of 1944. This is confirmed by the aerial photo of the camp from 21 December of that year:
Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... er1944.jpg (The picture is rotated 90 degrees. I've marked the likely camera location again with a green arrow.)
So if the chimneys couldn't belong to Krema 4, the next closest option would be Krema 5, but now that's nearly 230 meters away:
The K4-5 chimneys were pretty big structures at just shy of 17 m tall and nearly 1.6 m wide at the top (see Pressac,
p. 405). With a clear line of sight, the K5 pair no doubt would have been visible . . . but would they have appeared as large as they do in the photo? Consider as well that the chimneys were themselves no more than about ten meters apart (see for example the plan reproduced in Pressac
p. 399; the numbers are hard to read, but a reasonable estimate can be made just by using the size of the doors as a benchmark). I won't try to do the trigonometry here (that might be embarrasing, lol), but I think anyone can see, intuitively, that if those chimneys are 200+ meters away, they'd have to be more ten meters apart. (The same goes, in fact, even if they belonged to K4 at a 120 meters away.)
Turning around and switching sides to keep the fence on the right, the distances to K2 and K3 are even greater:
K3, the nearer of the two, is about 380 meters from the closest likely camera location, and of course K2 and 3 only had one chimney each. Finally, the angle would be wrong to catch even one of the chimneys (K3's) along with the Kanada barracks, let alone both.
In other words, the chimneys in the "Kanada burning" photo simply can't have belonged to an undestroyed Krema building. So what were they then? Probably just the heating-stove chimneys that were installed in all of the residential barracks at Birkenau and which still litter the site to this day:
Were such chimneys installed in the buildings of the Kanada area? I don't know. But it seems the most likely explanation . . . assuming the picture really does show Kanada.
I agree with Carolyn that there's a lot that's suspicious about the story of how the Germans allegedly snuck back into Birkenau to blow up the Krema buildings in order to "destroy all traces of their crimes" but I don't think this picture does much to disprove it. In a way, actually, I think that the earlier demolition of the K4 building--and thus its absence from the picture--may be the best clue to why the Kremas were taken apart in the first place. The crematory ovens in K4 failed shortly after installation (see Pressac p. 379ff for details) and the site never became operational, so the Germans simply dismantled it in order to use the materials elsewhere.
In other words, if they were concerned about destroying buildings to eliminate evidence, the Germans could (playing along with the official storyline for a moment . . . ) have left K4 standing and focused on dismantling the other Kremas instead. After all, compared to the other buildings, K4 should have been almost completely free of dangerous "criminal traces." Instead, they did what sensible site managers naturally would do: they dismantled structures in order of least-used as they prepared to pull out, so that they could salvage materials and equipment for elsewhere and deny their use to the enemy, all the while maintaining site-functionality for as along as possible--something which would, at all times, have included the necessary presence of the crematories in order to maintain hygiene in a camp threatened with epidemic disease. There's no mystery to it, and no evidence of "consciousness of guilt."
I too suspect that the "blowing up of the gas chambers" is probably a myth, with the real vandals being the Soviets, but even if the Germans had resorted to explosives, it would only have been to complete a job started months before for reasons having nothing to do with deception. Either way, though, we will have to rely on other evidence than Makarewicz's picture.
