JANUARY 16 - DAILY CHRONICLES OF HISTORY

JANUARY 16

 1920

The League of Nations held its first council meeting in Paris on January 16,  1920, six days after the Versailles Treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations came into effect.  The headquarters of the League was moved from London to Geneva on November 1, 1920, where the first General Assembly was held two weeks later. The Palais Wilson, named after US President Wilson's efforts to establish the League, was located on Geneva's western lake shore. The League of Nations was created as a result of the Paris Peace Conference which ended World War I. It was the first international organization professing the principal mission was to maintain world peace.  Among its goals, as stipulated in its Covenant, was the prevention of wars through collective security and disarmament and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration.

1945

Hitler Took Refuge in Bunker:  Hitler moved into the Führerbunker joined by his senior staff, including Martin Bormann. (In April 1945, Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels moved into the Führerbunker while Magda Goebbels and their six children took residence in the upper Vorbunker. Two or three dozen support, medical, and administrative staff were also sheltered there. These included Hitler's secretaries (including Traudl Junge), a nurse named Erna Flegel, and telephone switchboard operator Sergeant Rochus Misch. The Fuhrerbunker was an air-raid shelter located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and part of a wider network of subterranean bunker complex constructed in two phases, completed in 1936 and 1944. It was the last of the Führer Headquarters used by Adolf Hitler during World War II.

2015

Miriam Akavia (nee Matylda Weinfeld) died on this day. She was the President of the organization called Platform for Jewish-Polish Dialogue. She organized meetings between teenagers of Poland and Israel. She struggled to dispel the stereotypes which had long separated Poles and Jews, and which had obscured understanding of each other. She was born in 1927 in Krakow. She was a Holocaust survivor, and after the war became a writer and translator. She received many honours from Poland, Israel, and Germany.