David Dushman: Last Surviving Auschwitz Liberator Dies Aged 98

David Dushman, the last surviving Allied soldier involved in the liberation of Auschwitz, has died aged 98.

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

Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazis' concentration camps and extermination centres.

More than 1.1 million men, women and children died there.

As a young Red Army soldier, Mr Dushman flattened the forbidding fence around the notorious Nazi death camp with his tank on 27 January 1945.

After the Second World War, he helped train the Soviet Union's women's national fencing team and survived the attack on the Munich Olympics.

Later in life, Mr Dushman visited schools to tell students about the war and the horrors of the Holocaust.

"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 frontlines when the National Socialists' machinery of murder was destroyed."

Along with other heroes of Auschwitz, Mr Dushman has saved many lives, she added.

Cover image: Alamy.