The Last Surviving Soldier Who Liberated Auschwitz Has Died

| June 8, 2021

Soviet soldier David Dushman

Sad news from Russia that the last of the liberators of Auschwitz has passed on. From NPR;

David Dushman, the last surviving Soviet soldier involved in the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, has died. He was 98.

The Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria said Sunday that Dushman had died at a Munich hospital on Saturday.

“Every witness to history who passes on is a loss, but saying farewell to David Dushman is particularly painful,” said Charlotte Knobloch, a former head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews. “Dushman was right on the front lines when the National Socialists’ machinery of murder was destroyed.”

As a young Red Army soldier, Dushman flattened the forbidding electric fence around the notorious Nazi death camp with his T-34 tank on Jan. 27, 1945.

He admitted that he and his comrades didn’t immediately realize the full magnitude of what had happened in Auschwitz.

“Skeletons everywhere,” he recalled in a 2015 interview with Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “They stumbled out of the barracks, they sat and lay among the dead. Terrible. We threw them all of our canned food and immediately drove on, to hunt fascists.”

God bless, ’em. As with many in the Red Army at the time, he’d seen much of the war by 1945. NPR says;

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

 

Category: Russia

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FuzeVT

I saw this the other day. The thought occurred to me that David Dushman was about as un-Russian sounding as most names get.

Rest well, sir. I can’t imagine what you saw in those short years of the war (and before and after, for that matter, in Stalin’s USSR).

David

yeah, oughta be a good American name like Caviani, Upshur, Iams, Zabitosky or Yntema.

ChipNASA

I hope these old souls are in heaven giving each other hugs.
One can only imagine.

A Proud Infidel®™️

Another Warrior joins his Comrades in Valhalla.

Green Thumb

Agreed.

Sapper3307

Drink up good comrade!

Skippy

Rest Well warrior

KoB

Raise a glass in a Salute to this Warrior. May he Rest in Peace…Well Deserved Peace.

Too bad history is not taught in schools anymore.

“…and when they came for me, there was no one left to speak…”

JacktheJarhead

Dude survived KURSK! He drove his tank over the wire at Auschwitz! The man is a hero. God Speed Soldier!

Anonymous

Hooah!

Anonymous

Democrats denounce Holocaust as “racist” Israeli disinformation campaign in 3… 2… 1…

Anonymous

As anti-semitic as left/liberal progressives are getting now, there won’t be living folk to say “I was there and saw it.” to refute them now.

E4 Mafia '83-'87

Seeing where he was 1 of 69 men to survive the war out of a division on 12,000 sounds acurate. I worked with Russian woman that came from St. Petersburg, and one of the things she told that was different about the US was men. What her point was that the number of men because The Great Patriotic War (WW2 to us) killed around 10,000,000 men in uniform plus about half of the 15,000,000 civilians killed were men and young boys. The country has never been able to replace that number, and the as she put it the “reckless” lifestyle of young men in Russia is why living, breathing men are in short, short supply.

ninja

So….

Did our beloved Dave “borrow” the pink bathrobe from the Russian…or did he buy one for himself?

Inquiring minds want to know….

😉😎

KoB

The robe came as bonus gift with the bike shorts. 😛 gabn/rtr/hbtd

Mikhail Koulikov

The “one of just 69 soldiers in his 12,000-strong division” is, unfortunately, the kind of thing that comes out of *somewhere*, means nothing, and then just goes from one obituary to another.

Maybe at the end of the war, was one of only 69 who had served with the the division from when it was first formed.

And, really, same with “last surviving soldier”. Last one that went on to become famous after the war for something else entirely, and so, get an obituary.

penguinman000

In line with this commie, here are two other commies everyone should read about. Vice Admiral Vasily Arkhipov and LTCOL Stanislav Petrov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Graybeard

Perhaps he, as an individual, was different, but my view of Ruskies in WWII is colored by what my aunt and a good friend recall from their childhood in Germany.
My aunt was a child during the war in Eastern Germany (now Poland). She and her mother ended up in Berlin at war’s end. Hiding from the Russians in a basement, when a drunk Russian came in and picked out her mother to come with him to rape her. An officer heard and saw her crying and clinging to her mother and make the soldier let them go. But the women were in constant fear of the common Ruskie soldier.
My good friend was a child in another part of Germany that was liberated by the Americans. They came out and cheered when the Americans came through.
Their area was turned over to the Russians as part of the deal where the Allies all got a slice of Berlin. When the Americans left and the Russians came in, everyone hid in their houses. Her brother (who’d been a submariner) smuggled her out to an area controlled by the Americans, partly to keep him alive, and to give her a chance to live in freedom.

The image of the average Ruskie in WWII as a murdering rapist is strong in consequence.

David Dushman was, it seems, different. I hope so.

Sparks

Rest in peace old Soldier. You deserve it Sir.

Sapper3307

In his honor!