On This Day - What happened 28 June 1914 AD

Tension existed in Europe especially in the troubled Balkan regions in the southeast of Europe. A number of alliances involved European powers, Ottoman Empire, Russia and other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans threatened to destroy these agreements, till the spark of the World War I was ignited in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie was shot by Serbian nationalist Gaverilo Princip.

The Austro-Hungarian authorities encouraged the subsequent anti-Serb riots in Sarajevo, in which Bosnian Croats killed 2 Bosnian Serbs and damaged numerous Bosnian Serb assets. violent actions against Serbs were also organized outside Sarajevo, in other Austro-Hungarian controlled in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In 1914, a political assassination in Sarajevo set off a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I. As more and more young men were sent down into the trenches, influential voices in the United States and Britain began calling for the establishment of a permanent international body to maintain peace in the postwar world.