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It's hard to think of another event in the troubled twentieth century that had quite the shattering impact of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand [below] at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The Archduke was heir to the throne of the tottering Austro-Hungarian empire; his killers – a motley band of amateurish students – were Serbian nationalists (or possibly Yugoslav nationalists; historians remain divided on the topic) who wanted to turn Austrian Bosnia into a part of a new Slav state.
The guns and bombs they used to kill the Archduke, meanwhile, were supplied by the infamous Colonel Apis, head of Serbian military intelligence. All this was quite enough to provoke Austria-Hungary into declaring war on Serbia, after which, with the awful inevitability that AJP Taylor famously described as 'war by timetable', Europe slid inexorably into the horrors of the First World War as the rival Great Powers began to mobilise and counter-mobilise against each other.
To say that all this is well-known is a bit of an understatement. Seen from the Fortean perspective, however, the events of that day in Sarajevo have interesting aspects that often go unremarked. The appalling combination of implausible circumstance that resulted in assassination is one; Franz Ferdinand had survived an earlier attempt to kill him on the fateful day, emerging unscathed from the explosion of a bomb that bounced off the folded hood of the his convertible and exploded under a car following behind him in his motorcade.
That bomb injured several members of the Imperial entourage, and these men were taken to hospital. It was Franz Ferdinand's impulsive decision, later in the day, to visit the wounded in hospital – a decision none of his assassins could possibly have predicted – that took him directly past the spot where Gavrilo Princip, the man who actually killed him, had decided pretty much at random to position himself. It was chauffeur Leopold Lojka's unfamiliarity with the new route that led him to take a wrong turning and, confused, pull to a halt just six feet from Princip himself. For the Archduke to be presented, as a stationary target, to the one man in a crowd of thousands still determined to kill him was a remarkable example of sheer bad luck, but, even then, the odds still favoured Franz Ferdinand's survival.
Princip (seen in the photo at the head of this entry being manhandled away just after the shooting) was so hemmed in by the crowd that he was unable to pull out and prime the bomb he was carrying. Instead, he was forced to resort to his pistol, but failed to actually aim it. According to his own later testimony, Princip confessed: "Where I aimed I do not know," adding that he had raised his gun "against the automobile without aiming. I even turned my head as I shot." Even allowing for the point-blank range, it is pretty striking, given these circumstances, that the killer fired just two bullets, and yet one struck Franz Ferdinand's wife, Sophie – who was sitting alongside him – while the other hit the heir to the throne. It is absolutely astonishing that both rounds proved almost immediately fatal. Sophie was hit in the stomach, and her husband in the neck, the bullet severing his jugular vein. There was nothing any doctor could have done to save either of them. [David James Smith, One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914 (London, 2008) pp.182-3, 187-90]
The assassination proved so momentous that it is not surprising that there were plenty of people ready to say, afterwards, that they had seen it coming. One of them, according to an imperial aide, was the fortune teller who had, with spooky prescience, apparently told the Archduke that "he would one day let loose a world war." That story has an after-the-fact tang for me (who, before July 1914, spoke in terms of a "world war"? A European war, perhaps.) Yet it seems pretty well established that Franz Ferdinand himself had premonitions of an early end. In the account of one relative, he had told told some friends the month before his death that "I know I shall soon be murdered." A third source has the doomed man "extremely depressed and full of forebodings" a few days before the assassination took place. [Smith, op.cit. pp.161-2]
According to yet another story, moreover, Franz Ferdinand had every reason to suppose that he was bound to die. This legend, not found in the history books but preserved as an oral tradition among Austria's huntsmen, records that, in 1913, the heavily-armed Archduke had shot a rare white stag, and that it was widely believed of any hunter who killed such an animal "that he or a member of his family shall die within a year." [The Times, 2 November 2006] There is nothing inherently implausible in this legend – or at least not in the idea that Franz Ferdinand might have mown down a rare animal without thinking twice about it. The Archduke was a committed and indiscriminate huntsman [seen with a day's bag at right], whose personal record, when in pursuit of small game, was 2,140 kills in a day [Roberta Feuerlicht, The Desperate Act: the Assassination at Sarajevo (New York, 1968) pp.36-7] and who, according to the records he meticulously compiled in his own game book, had been responsible for the deaths of a grand total of 272,439 animals during his lifetime, the majority of which had been loyally driven straight towards his overheating guns by a large assembly of beaters. [Smith, op.cit. pp.69-70]
Of all the tall tales that attached themselves to Franz Ferdinand after his death, however, the best-known and most widely circulated concerns the car in which he was driven to his death. This vehicle – a Gräf und Stift double phaeton, built by the Gräf brothers of Vienna (who had been bicycle manufacturers only a few year earlier) – had been made in 1910 and was owned not by the Austro-Hungarian state but by Count Franz von Harrach, "an officer of the Austrian army transport corps" who apparently loaned it to the Archduke for his day in Sarajevo. [Smith, op.cit. pp.169-70] According to this legend, Von Harrach's vehicle was so cursed by either [a] its involvement in the awful events of June 1914 or [b] its gaudy blood-red paint job (see below) that pretty much every subsequent owner met a hideous, Final Destination sort of end.
The story of the cursed death car did not begin to do the rounds until decades after Franz Ferdinand's blood-drenched death. It dates, so far as I have been able to establish, only to the 1950s, when it was popularised in Frank Edwards's spooky potboiler Stranger Than Science (1959). This is not, as many Forteans will realise, a terribly encouraging discovery. Edwards, a regular contributor to Fate who wrote a series of books along very similar lines (sensational recountings of paranormal staples across one or two pages of purple prose) rarely offered his readers anything so persuasive as an actual source. He was a wholly unreliable author, prone to exaggeration and untroubled by outright invention, and in the course of his career he was responsible for putting even more vivid flights of fantasy into print than Peter Haining. To make matters worse, as pointed out by the rather more reliable snopes, Edwards wrote up the story of the jinxed Gräf und Stift at pretty much the same time that the rather similar tale of James Dean's cursed Porsche Spyder had begun to do the rounds in the United States.
Not that Edwards can be held solely responsible for the popularity of the death car legend. In the decades since he wrote, the basic tale has accumulated additional detail, as urban legends tend to do, so that by the time it made its appearance in full flower in that beacon of sober news reporting the Weekly World News (28 April 1981), the Austrian limo was being blamed for quite a bit more than just one solitary death: .....
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