I recently read several obituaries of David Dushman, who was described as the last living liberator of Auschwitz. Almost all of them contained a line saying something like "One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong column of tanks to survive World War Two...".
As I said, this quote, or something similar appeared in basically all of the obituaries when he died a couple of weeks ago, but so far as I can tell, the first appearance of a quote like this is in this Reuters article:
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-holocaust-memorial-auschwitz-liberati-idUKKBN1ZE1MA
This seems unlikely me (Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, and there must have been enough living soldiers in the division then to take the camp), but I haven't been able to confirm, partly because I've struggled to identify exactly which division he was in. Can anyone help?
I came across this news bit too and it all regurgitated the same information, like all the news sites were just copying off each other. I thought it was weird too so I did some snooping. There are almost no primary sources about David Dushman available but I did track down the orginal source for the obituary. It was a small bit in a local German language local newsletter and it in turn references only his self published autobiography.
So, there's no telling if any of it is true. I did manage to confirm that he was indeed a fencer in his youth but literally nothing beyond that. The claim about 69 survivors is a mistranslation though. Even Dushman who seems to have made some pretty bold claims about his past never said that. There were 69 survivors in his company, not the entire division (and he may even have been talking about a reunion, not survivors at the end of the war). At least according to Dushman. There was no mention of which division he served in which I found a little iffy.
Then there's the Auschwitz part which is also... odd. Auschwitz was liberated by the 322 Rifle Division which as far as I know had no armored components. Some satelite camps were liberated by the 100 Rifle Division but again, I don't believe it had any armored components. In fact, I don't think there was a single armored unit in the entire 60th Army. Dushman claims to have driven his tank through the very gates of Auschwitz which is also odd because... well... they're still there. They were last I checked anyway. It's possible that Dushman is refering to a subcamp or that his tank was indeed at Auschwitz I or II but I can not find a single source to confirm it.
I can't match the sequence of events with any Russian Armored Corps. Stalingrad -> Kursk -> Auschwitz, it doesn't make sense. However, if we look a litte wider, the unit I like is the 24th Tank Corps which would become the 2nd Guards Tank Corps. They were not in Stalingrad but they were there for Operation Uranus and Kursk, both times taking heavy losses. They weren't at Auschwitz though, if memory Serves the 2nd Guards Tank Corps was north of the 60th Army for the Vistula-Oder offensive (during which Auschwitz was liberated) and by quite a bit too. I believe the 2nd went via Lodz which is ~250-300 km north or Auschwitz.