None of the soldiers suspected what a monstrous place they were looking at.

The men belonged to the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army.

One of them, the 21-year-old tank driver David Dushman, had just rolled down an electric fence when figures appeared between the barracks, with huge eyes because the faces were so narrow, as Dushman later said.

"We tossed them our food and drove on immediately." Their goal was Berlin, which they should liberate from the Nazi regime.

Peter-Philipp Schmitt

Editor in the section “Germany and the World”.

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    David Dushman and the other Soviet soldiers drove past to liberate Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. At that time there were only about 7,600 survivors in the main camp, in Birkenau and in the Monowitz labor camp. The remaining almost 60,000 prisoners "fit for work" were on a death march west, the crematoria had been blown up shortly before, and the German guards who were supposed to kill those left behind were on the run. It was only months later that Dushman found out what “Auschwitz” was and that by chance he had become one of the extermination camp's liberators. He of all people, as he said: a Jew.

    Dushman was born on April 1, 1923, the son of a Jewish military doctor in the Free City of Danzig. Like his father, who was sent to a camp during the Stalinist purges in 1938, where he died after ten years, the son joined the Red Army. He fought in the Battle of Stalingrad and was also involved in the last major German offensive, the Battle of Kursk. He experienced the end of the war in Berlin. Highly decorated, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1945, where he devoted himself to his great passion, fencing. His weapon was the sword. In 1952 he was the coach of the women's national team of the Soviet Union and remained so until 1988.

    At the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, he witnessed the hostage-taking of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists up close. "We lived right across from the Israeli team," Dushman told the Jewish General on the occasion of his 95th birthday. “We heard the gunshots and the hum of the helicopters above us.” 17 people were killed in the unsuccessful liberation operation, among them the trainer of the Israeli fencing team, André Spitzer, whom Dushman had known for a long time.

    Another event made the Russians cry, even in old age: the death of the Soviet foil fencer Vladimir Smirnov in the quarter-finals of the 1982 World Cup in Rome. During an "Attaque Simultanée" on the Planche, Smirnow was injured so badly by his opponent, the German Olympic champion Matthias Behr, that he died a few days later. Behr's broken blade had penetrated the mask into Smirnov's eye and brain. Dushman was the first to take the desperate Behr in his arms and try to comfort him: “You can't help it. Such a misfortune is predetermined by God. "

    After the fall of the wall, Dushman and his wife Zoja moved to Munich, of all places, in the land of the former arch enemy. When asked about this, he said: "We did not fight against the Germans, but against fascism." Birthday, was. On Saturday Dushman, the last surviving liberator from Auschwitz, died in Munich.