Eighty years have passed since those ill-​fated shots on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. The shots killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife, Archduchess Sophie, and then the enmity between Austria-​Hungary and Serbia escalated into World War I. Of the 65 million young men who were sent out to the battlefields, some 9 million never returned. Including civilian casualties, a total of 21 million persons were killed. Some still talk about the outbreak of that war in August 1914 as the time when “the world went mad.”

History tells us that at the time of the assassination of Francis Ferdinand in 1914, the South Slavic countries of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were provinces in the Austro-​Hungarian Empire. Serbia, on the other hand, was an independent kingdom and had been so since 1878, powerfully supported by Russia. Many Serbs, however, lived in the provinces dominated by Austria-​Hungary, and Serbia therefore wanted Austria-​Hungary to give up all occupied areas on the Balkan Peninsula. Even though conflicts existed between Croatia and Serbia, they were united in one wish: to rid themselves of the detested foreign masters. Nationalists dreamed of uniting all South Slavs into one kingdom. The Serbs were the strongest driving force in the formation of such an independent state.

At that time the reigning emperor, Francis Joseph, was 84 years old. Soon Archduke Francis Ferdinand was to become the new emperor. The Serbian nationalists saw Francis Ferdinand as an obstacle to their realizing the dream of a South Slavic kingdom.

Some young students in Serbia were obsessed with the idea of a free South Slavic state and were willing to die for their cause. Several youths were chosen to carry out an assassination of the Archduke. They were given weapons and trained by a secret Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand. Two of these youths made an assassination attempt, and one of them succeeded. His name was Gavrilo Princip. He was 19 years old.

This assassination served the intended purpose of the perpetrators. When the first world war was over, the monarchy of Austria-​Hungary had been dissolved, and Serbia could take the lead in uniting the Slavs to form a kingdom.

The Bullets That Changed the World

In his book Thunder at Twilight​—Vienna 1913/1914, author Frederic Morton wrote about the murder of Francis Ferdinand: “The bullet that tore into his jugular sounded the initial shot in the most devastating slaughter mankind had known so far. It set off the dynamics leading to World War II. . . . Many of the threads of the scene all around us were first spun along the Danube in the year and a half preceding the thrust of that pistol at the Archduke’s head.”​—Italics ours.