There is a man who exceeds all others for indirectly causing the deaths of uncountable millions. The actions of this one man precipitated the most dramatic and horrifying events of the 20th century. His name is Gavrilo Princip. Perhaps many do not recognize this name but, as we recall from a previous post, it only takes a single match to ignite a global conflagration.
On 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb, murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophia as they motored through the streets of Sarajevo. The Archduke was the presumptive heir to the throne. The motive for this assassination was to free Bosnia from Austria-Hungarian rule since 1908.
The existing inter-European alliances were dominos waiting to fall. And the fall was dreadful. Austria soon declared war on Serbia, Russia declared war on Austria, Germany declared war on Russia, France and England both declared war on Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire. And in 1917, the United States entered WW1. It ended with 40 million casualties which included 20 million deaths.
But wait, there’s more. The Treaty of Versailles, the document that officially ended WW1, was rife with draconian demands from the victors. Germany was required to cede 68,000 square kilometers of land to France. This border area included extensive iron ore fields, once Germany’s now France’s. Additionally, on its eastern border, Germany was required to cede land to Poland. Germany was required to pay reparations to France in the amount of 20 billion gold marks. I noted the hyperinflation this caused in an earlier post. The German economic collapse and the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty paved the way for Hitler’s control of the government and then World War II. Twenty million deaths in WWI and seventy million deaths in WWII spawned by the act of one man… Princip triggered a cascade of destruction and death