First published June 8, 2021.
David Dushman was a Soviet tank driver who, on 27 January 1945, helped open the gates of Auschwitz, then spent the rest of his long life as one of the most respected fencing coaches in the world. He died in Munich on 4 June 2021 at the age of 98. When news of his death spread, many outlets described him as the last surviving liberator of Auschwitz. That label was not quite accurate, but his story is remarkable enough without it.
This page brings together who he was, what he saw at Auschwitz, how he rebuilt his life through sport, and why his friendship with a young West German fencer still matters to people who think about memory and reconciliation.
Who was David Dushman?
Dushman was born on 1 April 1923 in Danzig, today's Gdańsk in Poland. His father was a military doctor and a Red Army general; his mother was a paediatrician. The family lived in Minsk and later Moscow. During Stalin's Great Purge in 1938 his father was sent to the Gulag, where he died a decade later, a reminder that Dushman's family suffered under both of the twentieth century's great dictatorships.
He was of Jewish background. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he volunteered for the Red Army and trained as a tank driver. He fought at Stalingrad and at Kursk, two of the bloodiest battles of the war, and was badly wounded three times. By the end of the conflict he had received more than forty decorations, among them the Order of the Patriotic War.
What happened at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945
Auschwitz, in German-occupied southern Poland, was the largest of the Nazi camps. Around 1.3 million people were deported there between 1940 and 1945, and about 1.1 million were murdered, roughly a million of them Jews. Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others were also killed there.
As the Red Army advanced in January 1945, the SS tried to destroy evidence and forced around 60,000 prisoners on death marches to the west. When Soviet troops of the 322nd Rifle Division reached the camp on the afternoon of 27 January, about 7,000 prisoners remained, most of them gravely ill or starving.
According to Dushman's own account, his T-34 tank rolled over the camp's electrified fence. He later described skeletal prisoners in striped uniforms and piles of bodies, and said the crews threw their tinned rations to the survivors before moving on to continue fighting. Speaking to Reuters in 2020, he summed up the prisoners' faces in a few words: "only eyes, only eyes, very narrow - that was very terrible."
He also said that at the time he did not understand what kind of place he had seen. Only years later did the full scale of the extermination become clear to him. That honesty is part of what makes his testimony valuable: soldiers on the front line often saw a fragment of a crime whose dimensions took decades of research to document.
Was he really the last living liberator?
Several obituaries called him the last surviving liberator. In fact, Ivan Martynushkin, who in 1945 commanded a machine-gun company of the forces that reached Auschwitz, was still alive in Moscow when Dushman died. It is fairer to say that Dushman was one of the very last living veterans of the liberation, and one of the few who spoke publicly about it into the 2020s.
Some reports also stated that only 69 men of his 12,000-strong division survived the war. That figure came from his own recollection and has not been independently confirmed, though Soviet front-line units did suffer catastrophic losses.
From soldier to world-class fencing coach
After demobilisation in 1946, Dushman turned to sport. He became a fencer and then a coach, and from 1952 to 1988 he trained the Soviet national women's team. Under his guidance the team became one of the strongest in the world, collecting Olympic and world titles across several decades.
Fencing stayed with him for life. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he lived in Austria and then, from 1996, in the Neuperlach district of Munich, where he kept teaching at a local club. He was still giving lessons almost every day at the age of 94.
Witness to the Munich Olympics massacre
In 1972 Dushman was in Munich as a coach with the Soviet team. On 5 September, members of the Palestinian militant group Black September broke into the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine others hostage. All nine hostages, along with a West German police officer, died during a failed rescue at Fürstenfeldbruck airbase.
The Soviet delegation was housed across from the Israeli team. Dushman later recalled hearing gunfire and helicopters overhead and said all the athletes around him were horrified. As a Jewish veteran who had seen Auschwitz, the attack on Jewish athletes on German soil affected him deeply.
A friendship that outlived the war
One of the most quoted tributes came from Thomas Bach, a West German fencer born after the war who went on to win Olympic gold in 1976 and later became president of the International Olympic Committee. The two met in 1970. Bach said that Dushman offered him friendship and advice straight away, despite everything he had lived through, calling it "such a deep human gesture that I will never ever forget it."
That story is often told as a symbol of reconciliation through sport. It is worth reading carefully: it does not suggest that friendship erases crimes or losses. It shows one survivor of the war choosing to judge a young man by his own actions rather than by his nation's past.
Why his testimony still matters
Every year on 27 January the United Nations marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. As the last eyewitnesses die, first-hand accounts like Dushman's become part of the historical record that teachers, museums and researchers rely on.
A few practical ways to keep that record alive:
- Read survivor and liberator testimony through trusted archives, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Yad Vashem and the USC Shoah Foundation.
- Check viral claims. Labels like "the last liberator" spread fast; reliable museums and historians help separate fact from headline.
- Visit or support memorial sites, which preserve physical evidence that the camp's commanders tried to destroy.
David Dushman lived through the war, the Gulag that took his father, the horror of Auschwitz and an act of terror at the Olympics, yet he is remembered as much for his patience on the fencing piste and his generosity to others. That combination is why his life is still worth knowing.
Sources: David Dushman (Wikipedia); Liberation of Auschwitz (Wikipedia); original reporting by the BBC (June 2021) and Reuters (2020).
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