Demjanjuk “died guilty” says Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff

According to an article in a German newspaper which you can read in full here, Efraim Zuroff said this about the death of John Demjanjuk: “Demjanjuk died guilty of his service in the Sobibor death camp….”

Demjanjuk was found guilty, by a German court, of serving as a guard at Sobibor, but at the time of his death, he was awaiting trial for the appeal of his conviction because Demjanjuk maintained until his dying day that he did not serve as a guard at Sobibor.

The article in the German newspaper begins with this quote:

Former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk died guilty of helping to mass murder innocent Jews, the Israel director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre said on Sunday.

In a statement issued a day after the police announced Demjanjuk’s death, the centre said it believed there was “never any doubt” that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk helped implemented the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”

“Demjanjuk died guilty of his service in the Sobibor death camp and that is how he should be remembered,” the centre’s Israel director Efraim Zuroff said.

“Not as a person falsely accused, but as an individual who volunteered to serve in the SS, and who at the height of his physical powers spent months helping to mass murder innocent Jews deported to that death camp.”

Demjanjuk was sentenced by a Munich court in May to five years in prison after being found guilty of more than 27,000 counts of accessory to murder from the six-month period when he was a guard in Poland at the Sobibor camp in 1943.

A judge ordered him released pending an appeal, saying Demjanjuk was no longer a threat and was unlikely to abscond, being stateless, after the United States revoked his citizenship.

I googled Efraim Zuroff and found this information here:

Efraim Zuroff’s great-uncle was kidnapped in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 13, 1941, by a gang of Lithuanians “roaming the streets of the city looking for Jews with beards to arrest.”

“He was taken to Lukiskis Prison — to this day the main jail in the city — and was murdered shortly thereafter,” says Zuroff. So were his wife and two boys.

Born seven years later in Brooklyn, New York, Zuroff was named for his great-uncle and grew up questioning his American-born parents about the Holocaust.

So Zuroff’s great-uncle was killed by Lithuanians who hated Jews.  Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian who was captured by the Germans in World War II and was given the option to defect to the German side.  Zuroff should be concentrating on why everyone in Europe hated the Jews and wanted them out. He should be questioning why so many Soviet soldiers defected, after they were captured, and then fought for the Germans. Instead, Zuroff is consumed by hatred of the goyim and is voicing his hatred of a dead man who was persecuted for half his life.

It is important to note that Demjanjuk was not convicted of murdering anyone, nor of being an accessory to murder.  He was convicted of being a guard in a camp that may or may not have been a “death camp.”  It was assumed by the Germany court, without any proof being offered, that Sobibor was a “death camp” where an unknown number of Jews were allegedly killed.  Demjanjuk was found guilty by association because he was allegedly a  guard at Sobibor.

This news story written on Nov. 23, 2009, about the Demjanjuk trial tells about how the trial was based on testimony from the dead:

Munich prosecutors who built the case against former death camp guard Mr Demjanjuk, 89, put 23 witnesses on their list, some of them from Russia and Ukraine.

But all members of the list are dead. It means that Demjanjuk, charged with assisting in 27,900 murders during his time as an SS guard at the extermination camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland, will be judged on records such as his identity card and on the statements of the dead.

His lawyer Guenther Maull said the defence (sic) would contest the witness statements may have been made under pressure from Soviet KGB interrogators. “The men were questioned 30 years ago at least in part in the Soviet Union and possibly under pressure,” he said. “Whether their statements have any value as evidence is questionable.”

John Demjanjuk dies in a nursing home in Germany

You can read the obituary of John Demjanjuk in the Los Angeles Times here.  I previously blogged about John Demjanjuk and the Sobibor death camp here.   I wrote about the conviction of John Demjanjuk in a German court here.  If John Demjanuk had lived longer, he would have been put on trial again in Spain, as I wrote here on my blog. I am blinded by tears and cannot write any more.

Rest in peace, John Demjanjuk.

Update, 12:55 p.m.

A few minutes ago, I heard the CNN report on the death of John Demjanjuk.  You can read the full story on the CNN website here.

The following quote is from the CNN news report:

Berlin (CNN) — Former Nazi death camp guard and onetime Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk has died in Germany, a police spokesman said Saturday.

Demjanjuk, 91, was found guilty last May in a German court of assisting in mass murder as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland and sentenced to five years in prison.

He died in a home for the elderly where he was living pending appeal, Oberbayern-Sud police spokesman Kilian Steger said. As part of standard procedure, the Traunstein state prosecutor’s office is looking into the circumstances of his death, Steger said.

The Nazis and their sympathizers killed at least 167,000 people at Sobibor in 1942 and 1943, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Munich state prosecutors charged Demjanjuk as an accessory to about 27,900 of those deaths, and the court found the killings were “motivated by racial hatred.”

Demjanjuk denied the charges, arguing that he was a prisoner of war who was forced to do what the Nazis wanted.

The killings were “motivated by racial hatred”???  Motivated by whose “racial hatred?”  The “racial hatred” of the Nazis, or the racial hatred of Demjanjuk.

Note that the number of deaths at Sobibor has been downgraded to 167,000 by the USHMM.  It was formerly 250,000 that were allegedly killed at Sobibor.

Demjanjuk was not found guilty of “assisting in mass murder.”  He was found guilty of allegedly being at Sobibor.  The court did not prove that he assisted in mass murder; nor did the court prove that anyone was killed at Sobibor.  Demjanjuk was found guilty of participating in a “common design,” a new law that was created after the war.  Read my previous blog post about Demjanjuk’s conviction here.

You can read the history of the persecution of John Demjanjuk in an article here written by Jerome A. Brentar entitled My Campaign for Justice for John Demjanjuk with an introduction by Mark Weber.

The Nemmersdorf massacre

The photo below was copied from this blog; it is a photo of two German children killed in the village of Nemmersdorf by Soviet soldiers in the Spring of 1945.  Nemmersdorf was in East Prussia which is no longer a part of Germany.

German children killed by Soviet soldiers in the Nemmersdorf massacre

You can read the testimony of  Captain Hermann Sommer about the Nemmersdorf massacre here.

Prisoner taken by Canadians fighting in France, 1944

You can read more about Allied war crimes and the fate of Germany after World War II  here.

Netanyahu equates America’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz with Obama’s reluctance to stop Iran’s nuclear program

You can read the full text of Netanyahu’s speech before AIPAC on March 5, 2012 here.  My blog post today is about this part of his speech:

Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb.  They say that a military confrontation with Iran would undermine the efforts already underway; that it would be ineffective; and that it would provoke an even more vindictive response by Iran.

I’ve heard these arguments before.  In fact, I’ve read them before — In my desk, I have copies of an exchange of letters between the World Jewish Congress and the United States War Department.

Here are the letters:

The year was 1944.  The World Jewish Congress implored the American government to bomb Auschwitz.  The reply came five days later.  I want to read it to you.

Such an operation could be executed only by diverting considerable air support essential to the success of our forces elsewhere…

and in any case, it  would be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources…

And, my friends, here’s the most remarkable sentence of all, and I quote:

Such an effort might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.

Think about that – “even more vindictive action” — than the Holocaust.

O.K. I have thought about it.  The Holocaust was a vindictive action?  I thought the Jews were completely innocent and the evil Nazis just killed them for no reason.  What did the Jews do to cause the Germans to be vindictive?

But I digress.  Let’s get to the part about bombing Auschwitz.  Bombing Auschwitz would not have stopped the killing of the Jews.  The gassing operation would have been diverted to other places that had gas chambers:  Dachau, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Majdanek, Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Natzweiler, Stutthof, Hartheim Castle, and (according to some survivors) Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.

If all the gas chambers had been bombed, the Jews would have been killed by other means, such as shooting.  Auschwitz would have closed down and the Jews would have been shot in the countries where they lived, instead of transporting them to Auschwitz.  This would have been a more efficient way of killing the Jews and would have resulted in more deaths.

Bombing the Auschwitz gas chambers would have resulted in more deaths because, with only one bomb, America could have killed 2,000 Jews who were inside the gas chamber at the time that the bomb hit it. Besides that, there would have been other Jews, working in the nearby kitchen, that would have been killed if Krema II, the main gas chamber, had been bombed.  The Krema V gas chamber was near the clothing warehouses and a bomb would have killed the Jews who were sorting the clothes.

Hair today, gone tommorrow — the exhibits at Auschwitz

I can very clearly recall the day that I decided to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.  I was sitting with friends at an outdoor garden party on a beautiful day in June 1998 when someone said to me:  “If you are interested in history, you should go to Auschwitz as soon as possible and see the exhibits because the hair cut from the heads of the Jews is deteriorating rapidly.”  Right then, I decided to drop everything and go to Poland; if I delayed my visit, I might never get to see the hair since it was deteriorating rapidly.   But wait a minute!  Hair doesn’t deteriorate.  My grandparents had hair in frames, hung on the wall in the parlor, and it was still in perfect condition many years later.  I decided to wait until October to go to Auschwitz.

What does this have to do with anything?  Today, I read in the news here about yet another trip to Auschwitz made by British students.  This quote is from the news article:

HUMAN hair, once sleek and dark, is now grey.

It has aged, unlike the men, woman and children – victims of the Holocaust – who had it brutally cropped from their heads as part of the dehumanisation process nearly 70 years ago.

The hair is not grey because it has aged.  The hair has turned grey because it was subjected to chemicals, probably Zyklon-B, to kill any possible lice lurking there.

The hair was cut from the heads, not to dehumanize the prisoners, but to get rid of the lice that spreads typhus. These students should have been told the truth: that the hair was cut in an attempt to save lives.

Hair in Auschwitz exhibit Photo Credit: Lukasz Trzcinski 

The article continues with this quote:

In other cabinets are piles of shoes, glasses, hairbrushes, suitcases, false limbs and crutches which belonged to those arriving at the former Nazi concentration camp (now a museum) in Oswiecim.  [...]

But it is the hair, which we are told was turned into blankets, clothing and mattresses, which is the most personal and shocking.

The sinister display is entitled Exploiting The Corpses. Our Polish guide explains how gold teeth, watches and rings were also removed from bodies and sent to Germany in the early 1940s.  [...]

Billy Myles, 16, from Trinity School in Aspley, didn’t expect the hair to disturb him as much as it did.

“When you read about it, it teaches you the knowledge but it does not get you on a personal level. The hair really shocked me,” he says.

Many of those who died or were forced to work in labour camps were younger than Billy. Can he imagine it?

No, Billy can’t imagine it because he was not told the facts. He was not told that there were two typhus epidemics at Auschwitz-Birkenau in spite of all the efforts to prevent typhus.

This website tells about how human hair was used in the Victorian days:

Hair art was common throughout the Victorian era. Complex wreaths, simple lockets, elaborate bracelets, toothpick holders, earrings and every other manner of decoration were made from hair. Hair art was used for a variety of functions from recording family history to tokens of affection exchanged between lovers. Naturally, hair art also became a popular means to memorialize loved ones who had passed on. Mourning jewelry created with hair was intensely popular because it did not violate the strict code of conduct Victorian society imposed upon the conduct and dress of grieving persons. In this capacity hair art is best remembered. The hair of individuals and sometimes entire families can still be found intricately crafted and solemnly tucked behind glass frames or behind jeweler’s cases at antique stores.

In the Victorian days, hair was not disinfected with Zyklon-B, so it did not deteriorate.  A Victorian frame with hair behind glass should be displayed at Auschwitz beside the huge glass case of hair, so that the British students can understand that human hair does not turn grey with age.  The students should be told that 4 million people died from typhus in Poland in World War One, but in World War II, cutting the hair saved many lives.

Auschwitz gas chamber — 3D model of Krema II

Update March 26, 2012: You can see a longer, more detailed version of this video on this website.  Scroll down to the bottom of the index page on the website and click on the link “full version.”

This YouTube video shows a 3D model of Krema II, the main Auschwitz gas chamber where 500,000 Jews were gassed, 2000 at a time, in two years time.  More Jews died in the Krema II gas chamber at Auschwitz than all the American soldiers who died in World War II.  This video shows in detail how the Jews were gassed and their bodies burned in the ovens.  The title of the video is Auschwitz, the Comedy.

Glen Campbell and Alzheimer’s disease

Yesterday, I watched a repeat of a Fox News special, hosted by Shepard Smith, which first aired on Feb. 18, 2012; the show features an interview with Glen Campbell about his battle with Alzheimer’s, and also shows him singing on his current tour.

Glen Campbell is 75 and he looks damned good for 75.  If Glenn has Alzheimer’s, how can he remember the lyrics to all his songs?  It is Shepard Smith that I am worried about — he has changed in appearance in the last year or so and now looks very unhealthy.

By sheer coincidence, I had just read an article in the latest edition of Sacramento Magazine entitled You Must Remember This, Six Things to Keep in Mind about Memory Loss. 

According to the magazine article, “Short-term memory problems are the most concerning kind. [...] In Alzheimer’s, short-term (memory) is the first aspect of memory to be lost.”

According to the magazine article, Dr. Michael McCloud, of the U.C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, says that most people, who fear that they have Alzheimer’s, don’t have it.  Dr. McCloud, who specializes in healthy-aging, says that one out of every four Americans older than 65 have MCI (mild cognitive impairment). Dr. McCloud recommends mental stimulation, such as doing crossword puzzles and learning a new language, to prevent Alzheimer’s.

Glen Campbell is currently on his Farewell Tour.  If he ever gets to Sacramento, he should see Dr. McCloud at the U.C. Davis Medical Center.  I believe that Dr. McCloud would tell him that he has MCI, not Alzheimer’s.

Here is a quote from the Sacramento Magazine article:

Other things that have been shown to battle memory loss and improve brain function: blueberries, tumeric, Omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins B12 and D.

I eat blueberries almost every day and I eat walnuts for Omega-3 every day.  I take tumeric capsules with every meal, along with Vitamin D pills.  I don’t take vitamin B-12 because the B vitamins should always be taken together.  I think I get plenty of B-12 in my food.

I sometimes walk into a room and forget for a moment why I went into the room, but Dr. McCloud says that this is normal.  Dr. McCloud says that age-related cognitive changes in our seventh decade of life are normal. 

I’m not going to worry about all this.  I’m just going to have a bowl of oatmeal with walnuts and blueberries and take a couple of tumeric capsules.  And then, I’ll go for a walk.  Dr. McCloud says that exercise will help to prevent Alzheimer’s.

The most important symptom of Alzheimer’s is when you start asking the same questions more than once in a short span of time.  I have instructed my family members to take me to see Dr. McCloud, whose office is only 5 minutes from my house, if I ever ask them the same question twice.

French law against Armenian genocide denial overturned by court

This quote is from a CNN news article which you can read in full here.

A new French law making it a crime to publicly deny the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of Armenians a century ago was ruled unconstitutional Tuesday by France’s Constitutional Council.

The measure, which triggered condemnation from modern Turkey, was given final passage by the French Senate and signed into law by President Nicolas Sarkozy last month.

Sarkozy’s office immediately issued a statement calling for a new version of the law “taking into account the decision of the Constitutional Council.”

“The president believes that genocide denial is intolerable and must be punished in this regard,” the statement said.

The country’s highest judicial body reviewed it at the request of National Assembly members and French senators.

“The Council deems the law unconstitutional,” a short statement from the court said Tuesday.

The French law against Armenian genocide denial, which was proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, was passed by the French parliament in December 2011. The new law made it a crime to deny that the 1.5 million Armenians allegedly killed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915 was a “genocide.”  Now the council has ruled that the law violated freedom of speech, which is protected by the French constitution. Sarkozy wants the law to be rewritten, so that it can be passed again.

Armenian civilians are marched to a nearby prison in Kharpert by armed Ottoman soldiers, April 1915. 

Jews are marched to a ghetto in Krakow in Word War II

So what is the difference between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust?

According to Wikipedia, “the Great Crime (the Armenian genocide) was the systematic killing of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees.”

The Holocaust was a bit different in that the Jews were sent on trains to concentration camps, and when the camps had to be abandoned, the Jews were forced marched under conditions designed to lead to their deaths.  I didn’t make this up — the story of the Jews being marched in order to kill them is part of the official Holocaust story.

According to Wikipedia, “the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria.”  Holocaust deniers say that the Jews were uprooted from their homes and “transported to the East” meaning that they were sent to the three Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor) from where they were taken into Russia.

I learned from Wikipedia that “Massacres (in the Armenian genocide) were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace.”  You don’t hear many stories of the Germans raping the Jews.  The penalty for rape for a German soldier was death, and there was a German law against Germans and Jews having intercourse, so this prevented rape and sexual abuse.  It was the German women who were raped by the Allies in World War II.

The Jews and the Armenians are similar in that both are considered to be a race and a religion.  The Armenians have their own churches which are a bit different from other Christian churches.  For those who don’t believe that such a thing as race exists, then you can say that the Armenians are an ethnic group.

So it seems to me that, if there is a law against Holocaust denial, then there should be a law against Armenian genocide denial.  Or both events should be covered by free speech laws, and anyone can deny anything they want to.

The devil is in the details — Carolyn Yeager’s analysis of Elie Wiesel’s book “Night”

I have given a new title to Carolyn Yeager’s newest blog post about the changes made in the latest version of Elie Wiesel’s book Night. I first read Night many years ago when I knew next to nothing about the Holocaust. I read it in the public library, all in one sitting. I recall that I was appalled by Elie’s attitude of indifferance when his father died.  It never occurred to me that this book was not a true account of survival in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It certainly never occurred to me at that time to check the dates in the book against the known facts.

This quote is from the article on the blog Elie Wiesel Cons the World:

When I ended Part One, Eliezer and Father were still in the train car on their way to Buchenwald. You will recall that the Yiddish, the French and thus the original English version of Night specified the trip took 10 days and 10 nights from Gleiwitz (on the former German/Polish border) to Buchenwald. Since we know from standard historical sources (Danuta Czech, in her Auschwitz Chronicle) that the prisoners were evacuated from Monowitz on Jan. 18 and arrived in Gleiwitz the next day, Jan. 19; and since according to the description in Night itself, they spend three days in Gleiwitz (Jan. 20-22), this would make their day of arrival February 1, 1945. But in Night, Father’s death takes place the night of Jan. 28-29, three days before they arrived!  This is why Marion Wiesel removed the number 10 in her new translation, leaving the number of days and nights undetermined.

Ms. Yeager’s objective is to prove that Elie Wiesel lied in his famous best-selling book, which is assigned reading for every child in America. The detail that she uncovered in the above quote proves that Elie lied.

One might argue that the prisoners didn’t have calendars in the camps, so a mistake in dates is not important. However, Ms. Yeager has uncovered another detail in the dates in the original Yiddish version, that is much more important, as quoted below from her article:

A strange detail that actually belongs in Part One is on page 87 of the original Night. Eliezer remarks, after his and his Father’s deliberations and final decision to go on the march: “I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital. They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.” The evacuation, as we all know, was on the 18th. We also know the Russians did not arrive on the 20th of January! The actual liberation day is January 27. What possessed Wiesel to write this? Well, because it was in Un di velt (the original version):  “Two days after we had left Buna, the Red Army occupied the camp.  All the sick had stayed alive.”

I have always suspected that the Soviet soldiers arrived before January 27th, the official date of the liberation of Auschwitz.  The official story is that the Germans left Auschwitz on January 18th, then came back twice (on January 20th and January 26th) to blow up the gas chambers in order to destroy the evidence.  To me that seems to be very un-German.  I don’t think the Germans neglected to blow up the evidence of the Holocaust, and then came back to the camp twice while Soviet soldiers were in the area.

According to the testimony of Robert Jan van Pelt in the David Irving libel case, the Germans neglected to fill in the holes that were used for pouring in the gas before they left, so they came back to fill in the holes and then blow up the gas chambers.  If you know anything about the character of the German people, you know that the Germans always plan, plan, plan.  They leave nothing to chance.  Certainly, the SS men would not have left the destruction of evidence to the last minute and then run off before it was done, thus making it necessary to come back twice.

Why are the dates of the liberation of the camp important?  The original Yiddish book, on which Night is based, mentions that the Soviets arrived on January 20th, the day that two of the gas chambers were blown up.  I think that this date is correct and that it was the Soviets who blew up the evidence so that they could then claim at the Nuremberg IMT that 4 million people had been killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The Soviets also confiscated the death records and the train records.  With no records and no evidence to the contrary, no one could dispute the Soviet testimony at the Nuremberg IMT that 4 million people had been killed in this one extermination camp alone.

According to the Auschwitz Museum, after the fall of Communism in 1989, the Soviet Union turned over to the International Committee of the Red Cross 46 volumes of Death Books (Sterbebücher) which they had confiscated from the Auschwitz camp. (It was at the request of the famous Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel that the records were released.) These records, which had been kept by the political department (Gestapo) at Auschwitz, show that there were around 69,000 registered prisoners who died between July 29, 1941 and December 31, 1943. The Death books from June 14, 1940 to July 28, 1941 are missing, as are the death books from all of 1944 and January 1945. Based on these records, the International Red Cross has estimated that a total of around 135,000 registered prisoners died in the three Auschwitz camps. These figures are for Jews and non-Jews.  (Don’t repeat any of this in Germany, where it is against the law to quote the Red Cross records or to say that the Soviets arrived on January 20, 1945.)

New book of photos shows Auschwitz then and now

The cover of a new book entitled Auschwitz-Birkenau The Place Where You are Standing

I made the photo of the cover of a new book entitled Auschwitz-Birkenau The Place Where You are Standing as big as I could, so that one can clearly see that the two photos don’t match.

My photo of the guard tower at Auschwitz-Birkenau that was not there in May 1944.

Why did the people, who are in charge of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, build a flimsy guard tower where no guard tower existed when the camp was in operation?

Think about it for a moment!  Auschwitz-Birkenau was an extermination camp.  Jews were brought there on trains for the purpose of being gassed to death. Yet the old photo shows no guard tower, no dogs, no guns — nothing to prevent the 3,000 prisoners, who were getting off the train, from rioting and beating the Nazi murderers to death.  The guard tower was added later to show that the prisoners were controlled by a guard in a tower, pointing a gun at them.

Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau have just gotten off a transport train (photo from Auschwitz Album)

The German soldier in the photo above looks to me like a decent fellow.  It appears that he is straightening the collar of a Jewish prisoner, who has his coat unbuttoned, and his collar is in disarray.  But maybe I’m wrong; maybe he is saying: “You’re too old to work — off to the gas chamber with you!”  It does not appear that the SS man in the photo is armed.  He had better watch out for Geza Lajtbs, the woman in the foreground. She could be carrying a knife or a gun and kill him while he is distracted.

Photo from the Auschwitz Album, taken in May 1944

Location of the building (shown in the old photo above) that has been torn down

My 2005 photo of a building at Auschwitz-Birkenau

I identified the building shown in the photo above as the building where the women are standing in the old photo. The building in my photo does not match the old photo exactly, but it is very similar.  The building in my photo is located on the south side of the main road, in the women’s camp, and the building in the background is the gatehouse.  The photo in the new book was taken on the north side of the Birkenau camp, a long way from the women’s camp; the building in the background of the photo in the book was formerly an administration building that was outside the camp.

UPDATE 10:25 a.m.

A friend who read this post pointed out that the cover photo consists of two photos that have been torn in two.  He thought that the old photo on the left side actually showed the guard tower in the part of the photo that was torn off.  I am showing the original photo below, so that everyone can see that the old photo did not show a guard tower.

Old photo from the Auschwitz Album that is used on cover of a new book

In the old photo above, the man who is facing the camera and holding a cigarette at chest height is Dr. Josef Mengele. Note that he does not appear to be armed and he has turned his back on the male prisoners who could have easily thrown him to the ground and beaten him to death with their bare hands.  The Jews in the photo are moments away from being gassed in Krema II or Krema III which are behind the camera, only a few yards away.  The official website for the new book is here.