THE UNITED NATIONS, May 9. /TASS/. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on Wednesday to remember the lessons of the Second World War and pointed out that the Soviet Union made the biggest military effort to gain victory over Nazism in that war.

"We see a world in which conflict is proliferating, we see a world in which so many wars are taking place, and so I believe it is absolutely essential to remind us all of the lessons of the Second World War that, for the Soviet Union, was considered the Great Patriotic War," Guterres said at the UN headquarters in New York, unveiling an exhibition devoted to Victory Day.

"That was an absolutely unimaginable, devastating destruction in the world and I think we need to pay tribute to those that in the Soviet Union at the same time represented the biggest military effort against Nazism, but also by far the biggest number of sacrifices," he said. "Sacrifices especially of human lives, but also sacrifices of all kinds, that the Soviet Union has endured in order to defeat Nazism."

The UN Secretary General urged the countries to do their utmost so that that kind of events could not take place again.

"We see political movements that either confess their neo-Nazi affiliation, or at least use the symbology, the images, the words, for instance, ‘blood and soil’ - we see it repeated in demonstrations in different parts of the world," Guterres added.

"This is a cancer that is starting to spread again, and I think it is our duty to do everything possible to make sure that this horrible disease is cured, and the memory of all those that managed to defeat Nazism in 1945, that memory allows us to defeat any form of neo-Nazism in today’s time," he concluded.