David Dushman, a 98-year-old Red Army veteran of World War II and the last known member of the military who helped liberate the Auschwitz German extermination camp, died in Upper Bavaria over the weekend, CNN reports.
“Every contemporary witness who passes away is a loss, but the farewell of David Dushman is particularly painful,” Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said. “He was one of the last who could tell about this event from his own experience.”
In an interview with Reuters last year, Dushman said that the Red Army used tanks to knock down the fences of the camp. “We had not known that Auschwitz existed,” he said. Dushman was one of just 69 men in his 12,000-person unit to survive the war. Dushman himself had a lung removed due to injuries in battle.