How a Wrong Turn in Sarajevo in 1914 Led to Both World Wars

An open-topped car is reversing on a narrow street in Sarajevo. The engine stalls. And standing on the pavement, maybe two metres away, is a nineteen-year-old with a pistol in his pocket.

Hang on. The car stalls... in front of him?

Directly in front of him. Sunday, the twenty-eighth of June, nineteen fourteen. And here's what gets me, Theo. Two hours earlier, this plot had already failed. Completely.

Failed how?

Six assassins along the route, waiting for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. According to Cambridge University Library, the first one didn't throw his bomb. The second couldn't get his pistol out. The third threw a bomb and missed. The car sped away. The last three did nothing at all.

That's not a conspiracy, that's a shambles. So it's over. Everyone slopes off home.

They should have. But after the speeches at the town hall, the Archduke decides he wants to go and see the people wounded by that bomb. So the governor, Oskar Potiorek, picks a different route to the hospital.

Sensible.

And forgets to tell the driver.

He forgets to tell the DRIVER.

The driver, Lojka, takes the old turn, by the Latin Bridge. Someone shouts that it's wrong. He brakes. He starts to reverse. And outside the corner delicatessen is Gavrilo Princip, who by every account cannot believe what has just rolled up in front of him. Two shots, point blank. Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are dead within minutes.

One missed message. That's genuinely it?

That's the tripwire. Not the cause... the tripwire. Europe was already roped together by alliances, like climbers on a cliff face. Austria-Hungary moves on Serbia. Russia backs Serbia. Germany backs Austria. France is tied to Russia. Britain comes in behind France. One man falls, and the whole rope goes over the edge.

And the bill for that is what?

Four years of trench war. Estimates vary, but the figure usually cited is around seventeen million dead, soldiers and civilians... and roughly twenty-one million men wounded.

Seventeen million. Because of a wrong turn.

Now hold onto that street corner, because the chain isn't finished. Nineteen nineteen. Versailles. The victors hand Germany the terms. Territory gone. The army cut to almost nothing. And Article two hundred and thirty-one.

The war guilt clause.

That's what Germans called it. It said Germany accepted responsibility for all the loss and damage caused by the war. And it was the legal hook for the bill, which the Reparation Commission fixed in nineteen twenty-one at one hundred and thirty-two billion gold marks.

And they were good for that, were they?

No. Britannica says German bitterness over those clauses was, quote, nearly universal. Almost no German believed Germany was responsible for the war starting in nineteen fourteen.

Although... I've heard historians argue Versailles didn't cause Hitler. Isn't that line a bit too tidy?

You're right to push, and it is contested. Plenty of historians say the treaty on its own wasn't enough. What was enough was the treaty PLUS the money collapsing. Wall Street crashes, October nineteen twenty-nine. By February nineteen thirty-two, about thirty-three percent of German workers have no job.

A third of the country.

And watch the Nazi vote move with it. Eight hundred thousand votes in nineteen twenty-eight. Around fourteen million in July nineteen thirty-two, the largest bloc in the Reichstag. Then unemployment eases slightly... and their vote drops. To about twelve million.

Wait. They were going DOWN?

Going down. And that is the moment backroom manoeuvring persuades President Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor anyway. Thirtieth of January, nineteen thirty-three. Weeks later the Reichstag burns, and the democracy is finished.

So he's handed it. He doesn't win it.

Handed it. Six years later, first of September, nineteen thirty-nine, German forces cross into Poland. Britain and France declare war two days on. And this time it isn't Europe's war. It's everyone's.

How big does it get?

An Eastern Front that swallows millions. A war across the Pacific. And at the centre of it, the Holocaust. Six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, along with millions of other civilians. Total deaths are usually put at seventy to eighty-five million.

I genuinely can't hold that number in my head.

Nobody can. That's rather the point. It ends in nineteen forty-five. Hiroshima on the sixth of August, Nagasaki three days later, Germany occupied and split between the victors, and a new line drawn straight through Europe.

So the peace that ended the first war set up the second. Did the peace that ended the second do the same thing?

That is exactly what terrified everyone in nineteen forty-five. So they built it differently. The United Nations, nineteen forty-five. NATO, nineteen forty-nine. Not a treaty handing someone a bill and a humiliation... but rooms where enemies have to keep talking to each other.

Because the alternative was a third one.

And it's held, so far, for eighty years. Which is why people get twitchy when those institutions wobble. We've seen the other version.

I keep going back to Lojka, though. He was never told the route had changed. He just drove.

He made a reasonable mistake on a hot Sunday morning. The rope was already tight. The tinder was already stacked. He just happened to be the hand that struck the match. History doesn't usually turn on a hinge. But sometimes it does... and the hinge is a man in a car, reversing, with no idea who is standing on the pavement.