Story at a glance
- The Jewish IKG community announced Sunday the former Red army soldier was a “hero of Auschwitz.”
- President of the IKG Jewish community, Charlotte Knobloch, said David Dushman can be credited with saving “countless lives.”
- “Every contemporary witness who passes away is a loss, but the farewell of David Dushman is particularly painful,” she said in a statement, according to CNN. “He was one of the last who could tell about this event from his own experience.”
The last surviving liberator of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz has died at the age of 98.
David Dushman, who drove his T-34 Soviet-era tank over the camp’s fences, died in a Munich clinic on Friday, the Jewish IKG community announced Sunday, per The Guardian. The group described Dushman, a Red army soldier who helped liberate the camp in 1945, as a “hero of Auschwitz.”
President of the IKG Jewish community Charlotte Knobloch said Dushman can be credited with saving “countless lives.”
“Every contemporary witness who passes away is a loss, but the farewell of David Dushman is particularly painful,” she said in a statement, according to CNN. “He was one of the last who could tell about this event from his own experience.”
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As one of 69 soldiers in his division to survive World War II, Dushman became an Olympic fencer despite suffering serious wartime injuries.
Dushman recalled in a 2015 interview with Sueddeutsche daily, that the liberating force knew little about the extermination camp but saw “skeletons everywhere.”
“They staggered out of the barracks, sat and lay among the dead. Terrible. We threw them all our canned food and immediately went on to hunt down the fascists,” he told the paper, according to the Guardian.
Historians estimate that more than 1.1 million people, including nearly 1 million Jews, died at the Auschwitz extermination camp, which was located in then Nazi-occupied Poland.
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