David Dushman, The Last Soldier To Free The Auschwitz Camp Dies At The Age Of 9898

JAKARTA - David Dushman, the last surviving Soviet soldier who was involved in the liberation of the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, Poland at the end of World War II, has died at the age of 98.

The Jewish communities of Munich and Upper Bavaria said on Sunday 6 June local time, Dushman died in a Munich hospital on Saturday 5 June.

"Every witness to history that passes is a loss, but saying goodbye to David Dushman is very painful," said Charlotte Knobloch, former head of Germany's Jewish Central Council.

"Dushman was right at the forefront when the killing machine of the National Socialists was crushed," he continued.

As a young Red Army soldier, Dushman leveled the forbidden electric fence around the notorious Nazi death camp, with his T-34 tank on January 27, 1945, later to be remembered as the liberation of Camp Auschwitz.

In an interview he admitted he and his colleagues did not immediately realize the magnitude of what had happened at Auschwitz.

"Skulls everywhere. They stumbled out of the barracks, they sat and lay among the dead. It was terrible. We threw them all our canned food and left immediately, to hunt fascists," he recalled in a 2015 interview with the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche. Zeitung.

More than a million people, most of them Jews deported there from across Europe, were killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945.

Dushman previously took part in some of the bloodiest military battles of World War II, including the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. He was mortally wounded three times but survived the war, one of only 69 soldiers in his 12,000-strong division.

His father, a former military doctor, was imprisoned and later died in a Soviet penal camp, having fallen victim to one of Josef Stalin's purges.

After the war, Dushman helped coach the USSR women's national fencing team for four decades. He witnessed the attack by eight Palestinian terrorists on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which resulted in the deaths of 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and a German policeman.

Later in life, Dushman visited schools to tell students about the war and the horrors of the Holocaust. He also regularly cleans his military medals to participate in veterans' gatherings.

"Dushman is a legendary fencing coach and the last liberator of the Auschwitz concentration camp," the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said in a statement.

IOC President Thomas Bach paid tribute to Dushman, telling how as a young fencer for what was then West Germany he was offered friendship and advice by a veteran coach in 1970. Despite Dushman's personal experiences with World War II and Auschwitz and a man of Jewish descent .

"This is a human attitude so deep that I will never forget it," Bach said in a statement.

Dushman coached some of the most successful fencers in the Soviet Union, including Valentina Sidorova and continued to teach well into her 90s, the IOC said.

Details about the funeral arrangements are not yet known. Meanwhile, Dushman's wife, Zoja, died a few years ago.