'Memorable moment' as Germany buries millionth war dead in Lithuania

Germany on Tuesday held a ceremony in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas to mark the millionth German war dead reburied since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The German War Graves Commission, or Volksbund, buried the remains of World War II soldier Max Beyreuther along with 78 other corpses at the Kaunas German War Cemetery.

The ceremony was attended by Volksbund Vice President Detlef Fritzsch, German and Lithuanian lawmakers, relatives of the German war dead and current service members.

Beyreuther has been identified as the millionth German soldier to be reburied since the Volksbund gained access to Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War.

Germany and the Russian Federation signed the War Graves Agreement in 1992 to allow for the exhumation and proper reburial of soldiers killed in action, primarily in World War II.

Beyreuther was born in Halle an der Saale, in what is now eastern Germany, in 1912.

He enlisted as a medical officer in the Germany Army - the Wehrmacht - in 1943 and died in October 1944 at the age of 32.

His remains were discovered last year in a wood near the village of Kelme in north-western Lithuania.

Beyreuther's corpse was identified thanks to his identification tag, which was analyzed by the German National Archives in Berlin.

Fritzsch told dpa the soldier's burial was a "memorable moment."

"The unmistakable call for peace that emanates from war graves has never been more urgent and important than it is today," he said in a speech at the ceremony.

The Volksbund was founded in 1919 to search for the remains of German soldiers killed in World War I and look after their graves.

Today, it looks after more than 830 war cemeteries in 46 countries, where around 2.8 million war dead are buried. Every year, reburial teams recover the remains of a further 12,000 to 15,000 soldiers.