VOLGOGRAD, June 21. /TASS/. A group of England fans who visited the Mamayev Kurgan memorial compound on the Mamayev Mound in Volgograd bent knees at the Motherland Calls monument, Alexei Vasin, the director of the Battle of Stalingrad museum preserve told TASS on Thursday.
"We saw a group of six England fans who went up to the pedestal of Motherland Calls and bent knees there," he said. "This was a really emotional moment because they showed their attitude to the defenders of Stalingrad and to the history of the Great Patriotic War [combat operations on the Eastern Front from June 1941 through May 1945, in which an estimated 27 million Soviet people lost their lives - TASS]."
The Britons who have come to attend Team England’s matches during FIFA World Cup 2018 championship are visiting quite actively the Mamayev Kurgan memorial and other museums in Volgograd, Alexei Vasin said.
The city had official name Stalingrad from 1925 through 1961 and it became the site of the most grandiose battle of World War II in the autumn of 1942 and winter of 1942/1943. Even to date, the Battle of Stalingrad does not know parallels in human history as regards the geographic span of operations, the number of lives lost on both sides and the size of a group of troops that found itself completely surrounded.
"Britons come here because they know about the Great Patriotic War and the role our people played in the victory over Nazism," Vasin said. "They show especial interests in one of our central exhibits - the ceremonial longsword that King George VI presented to the residents of Stalingrad as a token of British people’s admiration for the courage of Soviet defenders of the city."
Winston Churchill presented the longsword to Joseph Stalin at a special ceremony on November 29, 1943, during the Teheran Conference, with US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attending.