I just happen to be [del]going[/del] wading through a book covering just that. It does not paint Kaiser Wilhelm II in a favorable light. In the wiki article:
Being over a thousand pages, Massie’s book covers this in infinitely more detail.
But Willie was not the only one to blame in Germany. The army staff felt war with Russia was inevitable and it would be better sooner than later because Russia was getting only stronger militarily.
Europe was pretty much a powder keg surrounded by sparklers; it was a matter of chance which one would set it off. After all, Ferdinand’s car stopped only five feet from Princip and his pistol because the driver had made a wrong turn.
The Ottomans were still pulling back out of Europe … the Russians still wanted the Balkans (better sea ports) … Austria still wanted to stop the Russians etc etc etc …
Thank you for your summary of UK politics, Malden Capell, that’s an interesting twist to this saga … Britain wasn’t beholden to either the France/Russian or German/Austrian alliances … She could well have stayed out of the War with so much domestic upheaval …
So … Germany, Austria and the Ottomans WIN the war … then Hitler never comes to power in a strong Germany, the Terminator never becomes governor of California, Ottoman decay is more peaceful and just … Britain and Germany/Austria happily split up France’s colonies, forming a prosperous and beneficial permanent peace … Germany does have the desire and the where-with-all to develop atomic weapons first and proceeds to annihilate the Soviet Union with them … Ubereurope becomes the dominate world economic force with all the Ottoman oil … New England is in financial ruin and the Falcons hold on against the Salt Lake City Patriots in overtime …
The bad news is the Holocaust still happens, but this time it’s successful … the Jews build their third temple in New Mexico … Martin Luther King Jr turns out to be Jesus Christ Himself and still gets assassinated … Mike Godwin is disbarred for calling Supreme Court Chief Justice Lyndon LaRouche a dirty LaDouchebag …
You have to wonder if certain elements in Austria-Hungary’s government may have allowed Franz to get killed. Him being dead certainly helped the hawks.
I dunno; that’s pretty close to the false-flag conspiracy theories flying around today. It would have been far easier to concoct a story of a Serbian breaking into Ferdinand’s residence and shooting him there, leaving behind a handy corpse.
Ferdinand was in Sarajevo to inspect the troops there. Because Sophie’s marriage to Ferdinand was morganatic,
On the way to the troops, the motorcade passed a pair of Black Hand assassins who failed to act, but a third, Nedeljko Čabrinović, lobbed a bomb at Ferdinand’s automobile. The bomb bounced off of the back of the car to explode under the one following, injuring 16-20 people.
After the ceremonies at city hall, Ferdinand and Sophie decided deviate from the plan to visit the bomb victims in the hospital. In the confusion, the driver of his vehicle was not informed of the change and turned right onto Franz Josef street, the original route. Told of his error, he stopped in front of a delicatessen and prepared to back up. After the failed attempt earlier, Princip had stopped in the delicatessen for a sandwich. Seeing his opportunity, he exited and fired two fatal shots at Ferdinand and Sophie. The rest, as they say, is history but it’s a lot of moving parts that had to go just right for an A-H black operation.
Personally I suspect a lot of the warlike attitude was in response to Otto von Bismarck’s political maneuvers thirty years before. At that time, the German Confederation (Deutcher Bund) was a conglomeration of some 39 German-speaking states of which Austria was the big wheel. After a great deal of Bismark’s diplomatic maneuvering and a small war, the northern German states were unified under Prussian hegemony and Austria was left out in the cold. Even after the southern German states joined up, creating the German Empire, Austria was basically told to pound sand. That had to sting.
