Rarely has a bullet caused the death of so many. One-hundred years ago tomorrow, a Serbian nationalist fired a bullet that struck and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The assassination sparked World War I, which ultimately involved 100 countries and cost the lives of millions of people worldwide.
When armies in Europe started shooting at each other a month after the archduke was assassinated, the war was far from America. The U.S. didn’t enter the war till three years later. But, the outbreak of the war in the summer of 1914 had a big impact in Baltimore. We wanted to get a sense of how it shaped the large German community here, so we turned to John Foertschbeck. He’s an amateur historian and author of several books, including “German Catholic Parishes of Maryland and Pennsylvania.” He joins SheilahKast in the studio.
You can find translations of Der Deutsche Correspondent at this blog run by the Maryland Historical Society's Hilgenberg Archive Project.
