The loudest murder in history that changed the world forever (6 photos)

It became the pretext for starting a war in which millions of people died.





In the summer of 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo. This shocked all of Europe and provoked the First World War. Most likely, it would have started anyway - many really wanted to redraw the map and take the richer colonies for themselves. But the pretext for the meat grinder was the murder.

It was organized by Serbian nationalists from the Black Hand group, led by officers Dragun Dimitrijevic, Rade Malobabić and Vojislav Tankosić. They believed that if they sent the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne to the next world, part of the empire's territories would break away and join Serbia. There had been unrest in those parts for a long time, and the head of Austria-Hungary, against this background, sent his son to take part in military maneuvers in Bosnia.



Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sofia Chotek

Franz Ferdinand arrived with his wife Sofia. In addition to the maneuvers, they were supposed to go to Sarajevo and open a museum there. The failed monarch and his wife traveled around the city in an open car - given the local situation, this was rather strange. And along the route of the motorcade, the nationalists set up several ambushes. In one of them, the Serb Nedeljko Čabrinović hid, and when the car passed by, the nationalist threw a grenade at it. But this attempt failed and Čabrinović was overpowered by the police. Ferdinand did not understand that someone was sending him a final warning and remained in Sarajevo. So on the way back, he was met by another participant in the conspiracy - Gavrilo Princip. And he shot him and his wife.





The heir and his wife were seriously injured, but they could have been saved. But the royal family was taken to the residence, not to the hospital. They died of blood loss on the way. So there was a whole series of mistakes. Or maybe there were none and the assassination attempt was supervised by the Serbian secret services - that's why the decisions were so strange. When they started to investigate the case, they found out that one of the leaders of the "Black Hand", Colonel Rade Malobabić, served in intelligence.



All the participants in the conspiracy were detained, and the leaders were executed. But this was not enough. The monarch of Austria-Hungary recalled his ambassador from Serbia and both countries began to prepare for battle. Everyone knows how it ended - the First World War. The leading European powers took part in it and millions of soldiers died. As a result, Austria-Hungary fell apart, Germany became the impoverished Weimar Republic.



Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Officially, World War I ended on November 11, 1918. But some historians believe that nothing ended there, and the parties to the conflict simply took a break to gather strength before the final battle. And the British, together with the Americans, began to nurture nationalist groups in Germany in every possible way. It is they who are held responsible for Hitler's rise to power and the beginning of World War II.



Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

There is even a version that the future Fuhrer was supervised by Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, a friend of the son of US President Franklin Roosevelt. This Hanfstaengl closely communicated with Hitler, financed the NSDAP and was its press secretary until 1937. The story with the supervision is very murky, although the fact that both the British and the Americans diligently flirted with Hitler is a fact. And if this version is true, then they are guilty of unleashing the Second World War. Which later became the Patriotic War and took the lives of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians. But let scientists and researchers figure this out.

It all started with a few shots in Sarajevo.