(PresidentialInsider.com)- The last surviving Allie soldier who helped liberate people contained in Nazi death camps – most notably, Auschwitz – has died at the age of 98.
David Dushman was famous for flattening the fence surrounding the Nazi death camp in Poland on January 27, 1945. He was a young member of the Red Army at the time and went on to have a successful career training the Soviet Union’s women’s fencing team and famously even survived the attack at the Munich Olympics.
Dushman received an outpouring of love and support from all over the world after the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria issuing a statement over the weekend that he had died in a hospital in Munich on Saturday.
The president of the Jewish community Charlotte Knobloch said that Dushman was the “Hero of Auschwitz” and said that the pain of losing David Dushman was particularly strong as he was among the last remaining contemporary witness of what happened in that camp.
Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp, and perhaps the most notorious, to be run during Adolf Hitler’s rule of Germany. Over one million people were murdered in the camp, mostly through gas chambers but also through malnutrition and forced labor.
In 2020, Dushman gave an interview to Reuters in his apartment explaining how he and his unit used their tanks to push down the fences surrounding the facility, but said that neither he nor his comrades even knew that Auschwitz existed at the time.
Of Dushman’s 12,000-person unit, he was one of only 69 people who survived the Second World War. He lives the rest of his life with just one lung after being wounded.
