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Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has opened an exhibition on the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, saying the world has "a sacred duty" not only to commemorate the millions of victims "but to do everything in our power to prevent such tragedies in the future."

He called the Holocaust "one of the worst crimes against humanity" and said it was troubling "that recently we see the creeping rehabilitation of Nazis."

The exhibition, entitled "The Holocaust: Annihilation, Liberation, Rescue," includes documentary evidence and photographs of prisoners of Nazi death camps and their liberators — soldiers of the Red Army.

The opening by Lavrov on Friday came before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the Soviet Army's liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1945.