BERLIN , July 2 (Itar-Tass) - Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin has visited a WWII cemetery Treptower Park in Berlin and thanked the cemetery administration for keeping the graves of the servicemen killed on WWII fronts in perfect order.
The speaker laid wreaths to the war memorials - the Motherland and the Soldier-Liberator, and bowed his head in memory of the WWII heroes.
There are the graves of 7,200 servicemen killed in action while fighting for Berlin, including the graves of 2,077 soldiers who were identified.
The memorial cemetery was opened on May 9, 1949. The author of the WWII sculptures was Russian sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich, who had been to WWII fronts.
Soviet soldier, senior sergeant Nikolai Masalov from the Kemerovo region, who rescued a three- year-old baby from under a bridge, where he found the child near its dead mother during a battle for Berlin on April 29, 1945, was a prototype of the central figure in the sculptural composition.
At a meeting with the senior officials of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Sergei Naryshkin on behalf of Russia thanked the German colleagues for proper care of the WWII graves of the Soviet soldiers.