‘Hero of Auschwitz’ David Dushman, who mowed down electric fence of Nazi death camp, dies aged 98

‘Dushman was at the forefront when the Nazis’ murder machinery was smashed in 1945’

File: In this Friday, 8 May 2015 file photo, Soviet war veteran David Dushman, 92, center, speaks to people holding Ukrainian flags as he attends a wreath laying ceremony at the Russian War Memorial in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, Germany (AP)

David Dushman, the last surviving soldier who participated in the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, died on Saturday at the age of 98, the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria said.

Describing him as the “hero of Auschwitz”, Charlotte Knobloch, a former head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews said in a statement that he saved “countless lives.”

“Every witness to history who passes on is a loss, but saying farewell to David Dushman is particularly painful. Dushman was at the forefront when the Nazis’ murder machinery was smashed in 1945,” she said. “He was one of the last who could tell about this event from his own experience.”

Dushman, a soldier in the Red Army, was renown for driving his T-34 tank over the electric fence of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp located in the then-Nazi-occupied Poland.

A complex of 40 concentration and extermination camp, Auschwitz was the largest such facility run by Adolf Hitler’s regime during the second world war in which more than one million men, women and children were murdered in the gas chambers.

Those not gassed died of starvation, exhaustion, disease and individual execution while others were killed off during medical experiments.

But at the time, Dushman was not aware of the magnitude of atrocities at the camp, he later admitted. “I only learned that after the war,” he was quoted as saying in Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich based paper, during an interview in 2015.

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In the camp, as he mowed down an electric fence, he saw that the inmates “staggered out of the barracks, sat and lay among the dead. Terrible,” he recalled. “We threw them all of our canned food and immediately drove on, to hunt fascists."

Though he was seriously wounded three times during the war, he was one of the 69 soldiers in his Red Army division of 12,000 to have survived it.

Despite having part of one lung removed due to injury from the war, Dushman went on to become a professional fencer and later, from 1952 to 1988, a trainer of the national women’s fencing team of the Soviet Union. It was while he was serving as a fencing trainer that he witnessed the Munich massacre during the 1972 Summer Olympics. It had resulted in the death of 11 Israelis, five Palestinians and a German policeman.

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

He continued visiting the local fencing club to give lessons until he was 94, said IOC and trained some of the Soviet Union’s most successful fencers, including Olympic medallist Valentina Sidorova.

IOC President and former fencing champion representing West Germany, Thomas Bach, also paid his tribute to Dushman. Recounting his encounter as a young fencer in 1970, Bach said that Dushman “immediately offered me friendship and counsel, despite [his] personal experience with World War II and Auschwitz, and he being a man of Jewish origin.”

“This was such a deep human gesture that I will never ever forget it,” Bach said.