The motorcade rolled through Sarajevo on the morning of June 28, 1914, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were smiling at the crowds. They had survived an assassination attempt just minutes earlier, a bomb thrown from the cheering masses that had exploded behind their car. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne decided to continue the visit, changing the route to avoid further danger. But at the Latin Bridge, the driver made a fatal mistake, turning onto the original route.
A young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip stepped forward and fired two shots. Sophie was hit in the abdomen, Franz in the neck. Both were dead within the hour. The assassination set off a chain reaction that plunged Europe into war.
Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia, where nationalist groups like the Black Hand had armed the assassins. Germany promised support, Russia backed Serbia, and within weeks the continent was at war. Nearly 17 million people would die before it ended. The trial of the conspirators ended with three death sentences, but Princip, being a minor, got 20 years in prison.
The war that followed reshaped the world, and the shots fired at that bridge became the spark that lit the powder keg. In Chicago, another kind of war was raging. On February 14, 1929, seven men were gunned down in a garage on the North Side. The killers wore police uniforms, lined the victims against the wall, and opened fire with Thompson submachine guns.
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre shocked the nation. Al Capone, the city’s most powerful mob boss, was suspected but never proven guilty. The public outcry was so loud that President Herbert Hoover ordered the IRS to go after Capone’s money.
Tax investigator Frank Wilson spent years tracing Capone’s hidden cash flows, and in 1931, Capone was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. He spent his final years in Florida, a recluse, and died in 1947. The massacre marked a turning point in the fight against organized crime, leading to the expansion of the FBI. On the evening of March 1, 1932, nursemaid Betty Gow went to check on 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr.
and found his crib empty. The son of America’s most beloved hero had been kidnapped. A ransom note demanded $50,000, and the police, led by Norman Schwarzkopf, were overwhelmed by the media circus. A retired teacher named John Condon inserted himself into the case, claiming to have made contact with the kidnappers.
Lindbergh trusted him, and Condon delivered the ransom money in a cemetery, receiving a note that promised the child’s location. But the child was never found there. On May 12, a truck driver discovered the baby’s body in a forest near the Lindbergh estate. The nation was devastated.
Two and a half years later, a gas station attendant noticed a gold certificate that had been part of the ransom money. The trail led to a German immigrant named Richard Hauptmann. Police found a large portion of the ransom in his home, and he was arrested. Hauptmann insisted he was innocent, claiming the money came from a dead friend.
The trial in 1935 was a media frenzy. Lindbergh testified that he recognized Hauptmann’s voice from the cemetery, even though he had been 200 feet away. The evidence was circumstantial, but the jury convicted Hauptmann, and he was executed in 1936. Many legal experts still question his guilt, and the case remains one of the most controversial in American history.
The Lindbergh Law, making kidnapping a federal crime, was a direct result of the tragedy. On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a bomb in Hitler’s headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair. The explosion killed four people, but Hitler survived. Stauffenberg returned to Berlin, believing the Führer was dead, and set Operation Valkyrie in motion.
The plan depended on Major Otto Ernst Remer, who was ordered to seal off the government district. But Remer, unaware of the conspiracy, was contacted by Goebbels and then by Hitler himself, who ordered him to crush the coup. The plot failed, and Stauffenberg was executed that night. Remer was hailed as a hero by the Nazis and promoted to major general.
After the war, Remer became a leading figure in the far-right Socialist Reich Party. In 1951, he publicly called the July 20 conspirators traitors. Attorney General Fritz Bauer, a Jewish social democrat who had fled Nazi Germany, saw an opportunity. He brought charges of malicious defamation against Remer, and the trial became a landmark.
Bauer argued that the resistance fighters had not committed treason because the Nazi state was illegitimate. The court agreed, sentencing Remer to three months in prison and legally rehabilitating the July 20 conspirators. Their families received pensions, and the right to resist was enshrined in German law.
Fritz Bauer continued to pursue Nazi criminals until his death, and his work helped shape a democratic Germany.
