Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Gavrilo Princip, the assassin, was a Serbian Bosnian and his aim was to forge a South Slave state much larger than Bosnia (which, of course, would be dominated by Serbia). That dream came true with the creation of Yugoslavia.

(One of the ironies in the assassination of the archduke was that he wanted to devolve power on the empires minorities and end the traditional domination by the Germans and Magyars. Had he lived he might well have created some type of federation with autonomous nationalities. Whether that would have been sufficient is a question we can't answer.)

While Churchill is rightly blamed for his part in the disaster, his initial goal was to force the Dardanelles by naval power alone (a fool's errand, given the minefields and the range of the Krupp guns the Ottomans possessed); the landings were under the direction of Kitchener and Hamilton.

It wasn't quite that she wanted them to have their "say." Victoria had many children and grandchildren, and they populated the royal houses of Europe.

George, of course, was Victoria's grandson; so was Wilhelm II. Nicholas II was married to Victoria's granddaughter, Alexandra. Nicholas was also Victoria's great nephew by marriage (his aunt was the wife of Edward VII) Thus, George and Wilhelm were first cousins, George and Nicholas were first cousins, and Nicholas and Wilhelm were more distant cousins, although Wilhelm and Alexandra were first cousins.

Undoubtedly.

As John J. Pershing predicted, the Allies' decision not to invade the Reich proper and sign the armistice allowed the Germans to believe that they had in fact not lost the war, although the country was on the verge of collapse owing to the strains of war and the Allied naval blockade. Thus future German leaders could argue that the army was undefeated and that the Reich had been stabbed in the back -- by Jews and liberals.

You can argue that the reparations were too penal, yet they were not out of line with payments that the Germans had demanded after the Franco-Prussian War (reparations that Bismarck had opposed because he believed, correctly, that they would engender bitterness and revanchism).

And sewed the seeds of future conflict. The Danzig corridor was a flash point for years. Hitler could appeal to the principle to annex the Sudetenland, which made Czechoslovakia an untenable state; creation of Poland undid the partitions between Prussia and Russia, neither of which accepted the creation of the new state; and Yugoslavia finally unraveled in the 1990s, having been propped up only by the communist authoritarian regime.

It is possible (though no one knows how likely, given the Russian tradition of autocracy) that, without World War I when it occurred, the Russian state might have evolved into something like a constitutional monarchy. Its economy was rapidly improving after the debacle of the war with Japan, and Lenin worried that if the trend continued the conditions needed for revolution might evaporate.

It was Russia's insistence on honoring its treaty responsibilities with France that made the collapse of the monarchy possible. (And the fact that the Russian army could in no way go toe to toe with the Germans, although they handled the Austrians pretty well.)

The League was indeed impotent, but the reoccupation of the Rhineland was the result of a lack of will on the part of the French. Hitler knew that the French occupying forces could easily block reoccupation by the Germans; he counted on the fact that the French were weary of occupation, just as the North was after Reconstruction, and would not support another military confrontation.

 

Yes. And if Princip hadn't stop to get a sandwich, he might not have been there.