Alright. Here we go.
My name is James Portnow.
I'm the writer for Extra History,
And I'm here to tell you all the lies we told you over the past few weeks,
And regale you with the stories that we
wanted to but couldn't quite pit into the show.
But first, few straight up mistakes that we have to answer for.
Number 1, flags.
We did this couple times in the show, we showed the modern German flag, instead of the old empire one.
We miscolored the Serbian flag.
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. (My bad)
Our artist is a continent away, and so we don't actually get to work together on these things.
So while we do go over the episodes once the art's in,
things are always gonna slip through.
Two, saying young Serbia instead of young Bosnia.
This one kills me because, it actually can affect a person's understanding of the events,
and I so loved David's art for it.
This one's entirely my fault. It was a typo, I didn't catch it in the editing.
Three, we accidently called Alexander the Second, the Russian Emperor, in episode 1, instead of Nicholas the Second.
Four, in episode 2 we referenced Franz Ferdinand being Franz Joseph's son, rather than his nephew, which is false.
Five, we talked about an ambassador from Moscow in episode 3, when it should have been Saint Petersburg,
as that was actually the capitol at the time.
It just goes to show you right
I'm actually kind of happy, because, don't trust us right,
don't trust any one source on history ever, right. Hopefully, Extra History can serve as a jumping off point.
But, things are always going to slip through, and there's always gonna be things we don't have time for.
So, I hope, I hope its the beginning of your exploration into the Seminal Catastrophe.
But with that a troo
I do absolutely think that the First World War was the seminal event of the 20th century.
None of that was hyperbole.
Would other horrors perhaps have happened? Absolutely.
But many of the horrors that did happen in 20th century all have their roots in this one great, breaking of the worlds.
Like, when I said at the beginning, right, about 9/11 possibly not happening.
It's because much of the unrest in the Middle East can be attributed to how the Middle East was carved up
at the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that ended the First World War.
The Great Powers pretty much carved up without knowing much about it,
or having any representatives of the people who actually live there, at the event.
Which set the state boundaries for the rest of the century, right.
Leading to these ethnically, and religiously divided nations that we have today.
We probably will do an entire episode on just this peace treaty, and the effects of this peace treaty at some point.
Because its just that important, and that powerful.
Oh and also, in the first episode,
I didn't mean to say that any of the guys from the 19th century,
who sort of held things together, were nice dudes.
They all pretty much did some bad stuff over their tenure,
which I hope we really get to cover when we go back and get to do the 19th century.
For our purposes though, the important thing here is just that,
they were all competent enough not to let World War I happen on their watch.
Which brings us to Nicholas the Second.
You almost have to pity this dude, right.
He didn't want to be emperor.
No one thought he was gonna be emperor anytime soon.
So, no one bothered to train him to be emperor. And then, bang, his father dies.
And it's emperor time for old Nicky.
And, this guy, he was just-he was just really a screw up.
Under his tenure, there were pogroms against the Jews,
civilians slaughtered during protests and,
yea the beer and pretzels thing, that's absolutely true.
That also brings up another point that I should talk about, which is, Nicholas the Second's title.
I actually debated this one a great deal.
Back in 1721, Peter the Great actually changed the title of the Russian head of state from,
Czar to emperor, to more closely associate Russia with the west.
But, when I was going over this, I saw the title Czar used a great deal even in historical sources,
for Nicholas the Second, and while title, his proper title should be emperor.
But i was thinking about it and i was like, well, if even five more people realize that and remember that this is the Russian guy.
That's worth it to me, that's worth more than giving him the correct proper noun, if they're functionally equivalent.
So that was the choice i made. You can tell me what you think about that one.
And there's Franz Joseph, the last of the Habsburg emperors of Austria-Hungary.
Here again is a guy I have to feel a bit sorry for.
His whole family died around him.
His daughter dies an infant.
His only son committed suicide over a famous affair.
His wife was assassinated, as she toured Europe.
And then, the heir he got, right, Franz Ferdinand, was someone he never really liked.
And when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated,
I think it was too much for him.
This may just be my reading, but,
Franz Joseph's entire life seems like just a man getting more and more beaten down.
And at the end, I think he just wasn't able to muster the effort.
Or maybe he was just ok with letting the world burn because,
all of the things that had happened to him over his life.
Still, i mean sometimes he comes across as kind of a bitter jerk to me.
But enough of that.
On to episode 2.
Almost everything here is true, and is as accurate as I can make it.
But there some places where I couldn't find the really really small details in the historical record.
Like whether or not there was a candle on the table in the café at the start of that episode.
And that's the sort of thing that you can probably expect I'll just fill out for narrative flow.
You can figure that even in future episodes where its really tiny things like that.
Who knows, right?
They may have just vanished from the annals of history.
On the other hand, when i do have them, I'm gonna try and use them.
For example, the archduke and duchess's wardrobe.
We have records of that, that's all accurate.
So when i have those minor details, they'll be accurate, but don't trust them because,
if it sounds better to have a candle on the table, they're gonna have a candle on the table.
But anyway, onto the interesting stuff.
Now the whole assassination is a comedy that no one would believe you if you wrote, right.
I didn't even get to put in that the security was so badly botched that,
in the first car ride, a couple local policemen for into one of the cars instead of the archduke's special guard.
And the guard just took off without him.
Imagine if two random traffic cops got into the president's entourage,
and the secret service was just sort of left behind.
I mean, it's wild, right?
But that's, that's what's going on here.
And yet the assassins were such amateurs, that they almost failed anyway.
That said, the Princip sandwich thing, almost certainly a lie.
Well, half truth.
There's pretty good reason that Gavrilo might have been there, other than to get a snack.
If the cars had gone back on the route that they had originally planned,
they might have come back by that particular snack shop.
So, he could have been there for reasons other than a commiseration sandwich.
Still, it's a good enough story and I've heard it,
repeated by so many reputable sources that,
I'm willing to put it in the show and, just tell you here, warn you straight up,
I think it's, it is at best, a half truth.
Oh! Two other wild things about Gavrilo.
First off, He was dying of tuberculosis when the assassination happened.
And so, he had to kill the archduke. If he didn't,
no one would remember him.
Or at least that's one version of things.
I also saw a source that said he contracted tuberculosis when he was in prison?
Which is sort of why it didn't make it into the show.
And speaking of prison,
guess what his punishment for killing the archduke was?
For starting World War I?
Remember how I said he was a teenager?
Well, because of that - because he was nineteen -
The maximum sentence was twenty years in prison
Had he lived, he would've been a free man by the time he was thirty-nine.
So, it's this-very strange different world than what we live in today.
But, jumping back to the archduke,
his exact words, when he's having that altercation with the mayor,
They were too long for the show, so we had to cut them down and paraphrase them.
But, his final words-are absolutely true.
I think, if you get a chance, it's worth going back and reading.
There's transcripts of these final events,
and it's worth your reading when you have the time.
And, as a weird cultural side note,
For Franz Ferdinand, all of the Archduke's things, his hat, his coat, even his car that he was in,
is preserved in the military museum in Vienna.
It's sort of enshrined there.
And at the same time,
just this year, 100 years later,
a statue of Gavrilo Princip, went up in Sarajevo.
This...gives me perspective.
Sometimes, when I find myself rushing to judgment from my own natural perspective (being an American),
I think about this fact, that, from one side,
this guy who got assassinated, is remembered, preserved as a national, ongoing tragedy,
and on the other side, they're raising statues to the guy who killed him,
because he's a hero to them.
And so, a lot of history is a matter of perspective.
And I think it's important we remember that.
But, anyway, on Episode 3:
Here, I said that the Hungarians hoped for a peaceful solution,
and, this is true.
But it puts it in a very charitable light.
What was really going on was that the Hungarians recently wanted a degree of autonomy and a bunch of rights from Austria,
and they feared that if the Austrians defeated Serbia and imposed their will on them,
eh, they'd get ideas, and decide it was time to take those rights from Hungary, too.
Let's talk about the Russian and Austrian ambassadors for a second,
'cause history just BLOWS my mind.
If anything were to convince you of fate,
these are two guys who hated each other,
and over the course of their careers, they had fanned the flames in the Balkans,
they were at least partially responsible for the very incident that set off the war.
But, they were also elder statesmen,
and they saw what was going on.
They saw that this was going to be a catastrophe,
this was going to be a world war.
And so, they decided to work together to try and stop it.
But, in doing so,
They left a very unclear record for us.
I've heard MANY different stories about what actually happened,
I've heard stories [from] that the Russian ambassador was holding the pen about to sign the document,
that reverted all the war,
when, he just dies of a heart attack.
To a much more likely story,
they were having a formal meeting, as they were just starting to de-escalate tensions.
And that was their goal.
But, regardless of what happened, imagine what happens next, right?
Russian ambassador in this guy's house, so the press starts claiming he was assassinated.
And, tensions just escalate.
And from there, it means all of these delays.
All these attempts at peace, actually doomed any chance of this being a regional conflict.
See, if the Austrians had attacked Serbia quickly,
before the Russians could even mobilize,
and if they had taken Sarajevo, it would have been a final complete,
but all of these delays in the name of peace, actually made sure that could never happen.
So the big deal, the ultimatum, the thing that kicked off this whole "It's gonna be war",
well, I've read that Franz Joseph didn't even read the thing before it went out.
This is sort of what I mean about,
he had kinda given up.
That, at that point, as a head of state, shocking how often this happens.
We also have to talk about the choice to follow Sazonov,
because there's so many things, as soon as that ultimatium goes out,
all of Europe sort of erupts, and there's things going on everywhere,
and if you're interested in this, it's a great point that last week is a great place to jump in,
because there's so many amazing stories of people trying heroically at those last minutes,
to avert this conflict.
But, we decided to follow Sazonov, because we couldn't cover all of that.
And Sazonov, his day actually touched a remarkable amount of the key events,
and it allowed us to have a way into that.
But, I guess that leads us nicely into episode 4.
So, the telephone anecdote, where Bethmann can't get the Kaiser on the phone,
because no one has laid out a phone line to the royal residence yet,
as far as I can tell, that's probably true.
I've only seen it in 2 sources, so I can't be sure of it,
and it's something you might want to take with a grain of salt,
but I can definitely see it as something being possible in 1914.
And all the talk of Sozonov bringing everyone, including the patriarch of the (Orthodox) Church to pressure the emperor,
that part's true.
But that anecdote about the aid to camp, may be false.
I heard it from a professor once, but I can't source it, it's probably apocryphal,
but it's so well summed up Nicholas II's character, that he would give in because that young boy,
without even meaning to, implied he might be irresolute, that I decided to leave the story in.
Lastly, I wanted to talk about one anecdote between Sozonov and Pourtalès.
I've read from several sources, that, when that final exchange between the two of them went on,
Pourtalès actually began to weep, even really falling to his knees to beg Sozonov to reconsider.
When he put himself up, and handed over that declaration of war,
he then embraced Sozonov, weeping on his chest,
saying they never thought he would leave Russia like that.
And in one of these last gestures, when Pourtalès says he's not sure if he's not going to be able to pack,
Sozonov really does send someone to pack for him.
Think about that. These are 2 men who have just declared WAR on each other.
2 men who have just doomed the world, and yet, that's no reason to be impolite, or inhospitable.
It was a sense, on some level, that war didn't mean total war,
that you didn't have to hate your enemy, just because your countries couldn't find a way to agree.
This is perhaps the last time this happens in modern history.
So, with that, I'll just wrap up by saying,
what studying this taught me.
And that's how avoidable all of this was.
Even today, we see ourselves spilling blood over bravado, or failure to communicate,
out of inattention, or poor understanding of the people on the other side.
And I'm not one to say that war is unnecessary.
In a perfect world, it would be, but we don't live in a perfect world, and there are still wrongs to be fought.
Sometimes, arms ARE the lesser of 2 evils.
But THIS war was unnecessary.
And even to this day, an entire continent of Europe, has yet to gain the standing that it once did, before the war.
So, if we take just one lesson from all of this,
let it be that, when war is unnecessary,
it is preventable.
And too often, we go to war because neither side has the courage to back down.
So, with that, and I hope to see you in 2 weeks for the Sengoku Jidai.
Take care, everyone. ~ James