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WWI

On June 29, 1914, the day after the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Austrian interrogations confirmed that the Serbian government was behind the assassination. Serbia denied involvement.

Thus continued the series of events that led to “The Great War,” now known as “World War I.”

1 reply on “WWI”

A claim that the Serbian state was behind the assassination was not quite as far-fetched as one might naturally guess. Elements within the Serbian state hoped to cause violent disruption in Bosnia; Gavril Princip and his fellow conspirators were armed by Уједињење или смрт [Unification or Death], a secret society of officers within the Serbian military. This same secret society had, a little more than a decade earlier, participated in a coup that entailed the assassination of the Serbian King and Queen in order to put King Peter on the throne, and he was the Serbian monarch at the time that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were killed.

Yugoslavia was, of course, eventually placed under the rule of a single state as Princip himself had wanted, but that unification later disintegrated within the lifetimes of many of us.

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