SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich called the meeting in the Berlin suburb, in which he outlined the deportation of European Jews to extermination camps in Poland where they would be systematically murdered.

On the 27th January 1945, Soviet soldiers from the 322nd Rifle Division liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp near the Polish city of Oświęcim.

On the 7th January 1979 Pol Pot, the Cambodian revolutionary and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, was overthrown when Vietnamese forces captured the capital city Phnom Penh.