On June 28, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The image above was taken just a few hours before the assassins bullets found their mark. His last words after being shot in the neck were to his wife, who was hit in the stomach by a stray second shot. They were: “Sophie! Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!“.
These assassinations were a spark to the start of World War I. Europe had been boiling for a few years already and was just waiting for a reason to start a war. The great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, the man most responsible for the unification of Germany in 1871, was quoted as saying at the end of his life that: “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans”. It went as he predicted.
LEARN MORE ABOUT HISTORICAL EVENTS in 1914 at History0x