June 9, 2017 • 43 mins
In the early 20th century, Europe was a smoldering powder keg of international tension, imperial ambitions and long-held resentments between great powers. Although extensive diplomatic efforts attempt to reconcile and repair relationships between nations, a single assassination by a secret society launched Europe in all-out war. So what was the Black Hand?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:25):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is known. They called me Ben You of course
are you? And that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Today we're delving into a conspiracy, conspiracy
theory more than one years old, and it's one that
still affects the world today. Something that sounds like a
story just ripped straight from some kind of Tom Clancy
(00:47):
political filler, but it actually happened. Yeah, and a lot
of ways. It's really about this bigger idea that a
single person can, for better or worse, actually change the world.
It's like what you're mom told you, only true. Yeah, Yeah,
it's uh so traveled back with us. Ladies and gentlemen,
(01:08):
Welcome to the early twentieth century. There are all sorts
of dramatic breakthroughs in technology. They are all sorts of
fundamentally historic human moments. But unbeknownst to most, the world
was inching closer and closer to a deadly global conflict.
(01:31):
And it's what we today referred to as World War One.
What was World War One? You ask, Well, we shall
tell you starting with the fact that World War One
began in July of nineteen fourteen and lasted until November
of nineteen eighteen. And during that time, Germany, Austria, Hungary,
Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire also known as the Central Powers,
(01:52):
fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan, and
the United States a k a. The Allied Powers, in
thanks to a lot of this new technology been alluded
to earlier. We're talking about trench warfare, mustard gas, all
kinds of the types of tank that you could build
at that time. Now it's the unprecedented levels. World War
(02:15):
One died of carnage and just human destruction, just utter, utter,
inhumane brutality, atrocities. And by the time this conflict was over,
the ally Powers claimed victory, but it's at best epyric
victory because we're talking about a death toll of more
(02:35):
than sixteen million people, civilians and soldiers alike. I mean,
with the technology that we have now and the way
we can target air strikes, our casualty rates just pale
in comparison. To what we're talking about here. I mean,
this was just astronomical numbers whole buddy. If you think
that European political relations are complicated and screwing, now are
(02:57):
you in for a wild ride. In the early twenties century,
Europe was very much a continent in transition, with a
quagmire of ever shifting alliances, rival powers, and often contradictory aims.
And when I when we say like a continent in transition,
there were powerhouse economies like Austria, Hungary and Germany, and
(03:20):
then there were places like Poland. And this is a
war where occasionally there would be a group of people
with tanks and a group of people on horses, which
is which very strange, sounds like time travel gone wrong.
Even now, a hundred years later, century more later, scholars
and historians continue to debate the causes of this war.
(03:42):
We have a little overview for you of some of
the most often cited contributing factors. One of the biggest ones,
it's this concept of mutual defense agreements. So countries that
have signed contracts, treaties between them where if one nation
gets attacked, the other one will step in to defend it.
Um So you've got all these allied countries that were
(04:02):
required through these contractual agreements to defend other countries. Um,
there were all kinds of alliances. Russia and Serbia, Germany
and Austria, Hungary, France and Russia, Britain and France and
Belgium and Japan and Britain. And you can already see,
or you can imagine, with all of these different groups,
(04:24):
if a single one of these gets attacked, it's going
to create this lethal domino effect. Yea, and and several
are a multiple lists, right Like Russia is on two lists.
They have an agreement with Serbia and France. So I
don't talk about too much of my past. As you
guys know, I was at a time very close to
(04:44):
joining the State Department, before what I would call irreconcilable
creative differences let us apart. And one of the one
of the things that always got me is, although international
relations are very, very complicated, there is one or two
they're a couple of great analogies. And one is although
(05:06):
it can be daunting to hear all these names thrown around,
don't picture these countries as nations. Picture the world as
a house party, and every nation is a person at
this house party and there's a limited amount of beer
or chips, and everybody's making deals with each other to
(05:28):
say how they're going to divide the stuff up right,
and inevitably are they ruffles something goes wrong? Well, of
course they're ruffles. Man, This is a big time. Is
there onion dip? You know that's a good question. Homemade?
You gotta be careful with onion dip? You know it's
not They're not not All onion dips are created equal.
And if you have a good recipe for one, do
send it to us into this description here. Sure. Yeah,
(05:52):
onion dip would be another another resource. Let's say onion
dip was onion dip would be like oil in that case, right,
Beer's oil because there's okay, and they're running out and
you can already see, as Matt said, this lethal domino effect.
So what happened in uh World War one is it's
(06:16):
gonna sound a little bit complicated. We do want to
make sure everybody knows when we say Austria Hungary, it's
with a hyphen because that was one country, all right.
So Austria Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia got involved
because they're type with Serbia. Germany saw Russia mobilizing and
they declared war on Russia, and then France had to
(06:37):
had to hang out because they have an agreement with Russia,
and so they were going against Germany and Austria Hungary.
Germany attacked France through Belgium, and when Belgium got pulled in,
that meant that Britain had to go in, and then
Japan was like also me and then later Italy and
the US would enter, but not at the beginning. That's
just that's just one illustration. That's just one contributing factor,
(06:58):
and there are other ones too. Any of the US
also kind of has always, even like in World War Two,
had this sense that, oh, this isn't for us, this
is we're not, this is that everybody else's problem. We're
kind of listening to it on the radio and hanging back.
But then there's this sense that, oh, crap, maybe maybe
we are going to get pulled into this mess, and
then of course inevitably that's what happens. Yeah, we very
(07:19):
much an isolationist country for a long time, totally just
imagining the house party us just be like, bro, bro,
what are you doing? Bro? And then going in they
have to they have to get involved in the US.
Get your hands off my yetti, bro. The US is
also separated by two oceans and resource rich. So at
(07:39):
this party they're like in somebody else's room, eating their
own food, rubbing their own yettie. They're like, wow, it
sounds rough out there. Yeah, rubbing your yetti is not
a euphemism. Yeah, what is it, yettie? It's a it's
a fancy cooler yea. Yeah, but now that phrase rubbing
(08:00):
her own yetti is gonna stick with people. Hey, what's imperialism?
Good question, Ben, I'm glad you asked. As it turns out,
imperialism as a whole lot like a yetti cooler, not
at all. Though before World War One, you see, Africa
and parts of Asia were points of contention in UM
well among rather the European countries. So many European countries
(08:20):
they sought to expand their spheres of influence by building empires.
So with the U S functioning as an independent entity
all on its own in that isolationist way we just described,
Europeans were forced to make trade deals with US. So
the US, which at the time, and you know, continues
to be quite resource risks is an important source of
(08:41):
natural resources for some of these other countries, so rather
than enjoying the advantages of mercantilism, they had to deal
with like with peers in Africa and Asian societies. However,
this meant that they would continue to bear the brunt
of brutal colonial action in resource extraction. Why pay for
(09:05):
a mind or give people a living wage when you
can go in and plunder and murder them. You know.
It used to be in a hardcore band called Brutal
Colonial Action. Oh yeah, what what instrument did you play?
The muskett? Oh yeah, I'm familiar with your work. Man.
Takes a long time to play, and now it really does. Yeah,
(09:25):
it's like that. It's like you're the guy with the
symbols who's all in every large orchestra, who's just waiting
for that shot. They weren't using muskets in World War One.
You know, we're just time traveling. Man. It's cool. Stuff gets,
you know, stuff gets like woven in. I guarantee you
someone had a musket. I guarantee you're not gonna throw
(09:46):
away perfectly good musket. So the raw materials and the
resources these places could provide. We're seen as crucial to
many European nations, not just for expansion, but for maintenance
and functioning right and increasing competition. This desire for larger
and larger empires led to an increase in military confrontations
(10:08):
and skirmishes, which leads us to another cause. Militarism and
arms race began at the dawn of the twentieth century.
By nineteen fourteen, Germany at the largest build up Great
Britain and Germany really significantly increase their naval forces. And
and this is very important in Germany and Russia especially,
the military became an increasingly dominant force in politics and
(10:32):
public policy, exerting massive influence. And remember when you're a hammer,
everything looks like a nail. Yeah, And then comes in
this wonderful thing called nationalism that is a double edged sword,
but it can do great things as well. Um. So
each of these separate nations wants to be the big potato,
(10:55):
that's not the big pot yeah, you know. They want
to have a large just amount of influence, resource control,
economic wealth within their country and all kinds of trade
with other countries. Like the most delicious Wedges. Yeah, and
they had like the sour cream and the chives. They
may they want to be the big cheese potato. So past,
(11:16):
past wars and all these battles that have occurred throughout
history up until this time had drawn all these national borders.
But in various countries there are ethnic minorities they consider
themselves unfairly lumped into one of these nations, like under
control of perhaps laws that they don't agree with because
that line got drawn. Would that be consimilar to like
(11:37):
the Israeli Palestinian issue? It would be. It would be
similar because there would be people who in the in
the United Nations, maybe maybe another example would be like
the Balkans. But in the United Nations viewing of a country,
it just goes by what everybody else agreed forms the
(11:59):
borders of that kind tree. And for instance, in parts
of the African continent, the borders were specifically and purposely
drawn to separate concentrations of communities or tribes, right, And
that's where you go, That's where you arrive at things
like um, the the war in Rwanda where the Hutu
(12:20):
and the Tutsi had a a brutal, brutal war. That's yeah,
I get that man, that's a great example. It's also
kind of like in India, the border regions of India
and Pakistan. There's all kinds of conflicts that occur there
because of some of these differences. I'll tell you what, though,
that ceremony where they close and open the gate is amazing,
(12:40):
one of my favorite YouTube things to do. Fifteen minutes
long and it's worth every second. So specifically, much of
the origin of World War One was based on the
desire of Slavic people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to break
off from the country of Austria Hungary and become part
of a greater United Serbia, because like, why are you
in control? We're Serbian, We're not Austrian, you know. But
(13:05):
there was one more thing, a match to the powder keg.
With all these burgeoning tensions, rivalries and races for riches,
it seemed Europe was teetering on the brink of calamity
and all it would take it's one more push. That
was the push. Yeah, So actually it was more like
that push, yeah, exactly. Was the assassination of Archduke Franz
(13:27):
Ferdinand on the twenty eighth of June in Can we
just take this opportunity really to say that Franz Ferdinand
was a pretty underrated band. Whatever happened to those guys?
They still around. I wonder if they listened to the show.
They've got to be around, you think, so, Yeah, they're
probably still are in contact with each other. What about
the Arctic Monkeys. They're definitely together. They had a huge
album just a year or two, a couple of years ago.
(13:47):
And I think that one guy might go solo, the
lead monkey, the monkey, the main monkey. Well, anyway, this
bandit and we're talking about get their name from Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated on June in nineteen and
while many of the circumstances leading to the war were
totally in place at this point, um in the war
(14:10):
may have at this we've ultimately been considered to be inevitable.
The death of this single elite aristocrat was the match
that lit the fuse of aforementioned powder keg Yes, the
feather that broke the camel's back, the penny that shattered
the train station, The badger that broke out of the
(14:33):
bag and massacred everyone. Yeah, yep, the final potato they
got microwaved a little too long. Nope, No, not that one. No,
keep it the dog who kept barking at the son
of Sam. All right. So this death was the result
of one of the westerns world's most significant conspiracies. Have
(14:53):
you heard of the Black Hand, Well you will hear
about it right after a word from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. The Black Hand, also known as
Unification or Death, was a secret military society formed in
(15:17):
May of nineteen eleven by officers in the army of
the Kingdom of Serbia. They were hell bent or leather
on uniting all of the territories with a South Slavik
majority not ruled by either Serbia or Montenegro. The precursor
of this secret group it already assassinated the Serbian royal
(15:38):
couple in h three. Both the Black Hand and its
precursor were led by a fellow named Captain Draguten Dmitrievich,
often called by the code name at This, which is
a god from Egyptian mythology. And I do want to
say that none of us are Serbians, so we are
(15:58):
not going to pronoun ounce these names as native speakers. Yes,
thank you, Ben, you're correct. So what is this Black Hand? Conspiracy,
although other than sounding like an amazing band name. Well, okay,
so then you have to go back to nineteen eleven,
and that's when this group tried to assassinate Franz Joseph.
(16:20):
He was the current at that time ruler of Austria Hungary.
Um the student. He's an old gentleman, he's in his eighties,
and for a couple of reasons, they failed. And then
they turned their attention to this dude's heir, who was
Franz Ferdinand. Yes, this is this is a tricky part
of history, so apiss APIs the captain, the leader of
(16:45):
the Black Hand, wanted Franz Ferdinand dead, not because he
was oppressing the Slavic minority living in his kingdom under
his rule, but because he was planning to make important
concessions to the South Slavs that you can rolled. This
would make the Black Hand's dream of a unified Serbia
much much more difficult. Why would you throw a revolution
(17:06):
if your home country is making improvements on its own. Yeah,
they're just seeing or they're imagining, they're gonna be these
small incremental moves right that It's going to take idle decades,
maybe centuries to get what they want, Let's do it quickly.
Pull that band aid off. And the Black Hand was
not acting alone. They worked in concert with another group
named No Rodna Old Browna and its satellite organizations, particularly
(17:31):
a group named Young Bosnia. The Roda Bruna was older
and more established, so this gave the Black Hand massive
street cred. So by nine fourteen UM the conspiracy had
at large to a membership including hundreds of individuals, many
of whom were officers in the Serbian Army. They trained
(17:51):
guerilla fighters and taught saboteurs, similar in many ways to
the way current intelligence agencies trained revolutionaries in other country.
And it's not easy to keep an international revolutionary terrorists
freedom fighter organization ring a secret. It's hard takes the
work of many so members had very little knowledge of
the overall organization. It was on a need to know basis.
(18:14):
They would know only the member of their cell and
one superior who gave them orders. Yeah, it feels a
lot like secret societies that we looked into in the past,
or possibly the way modern day terrorist seals are operated
in the government the military, Like you may not know
who's functioning. They're called seals because their self contained, right,
They don't have a line to others, They cannot give
(18:35):
information that would lead to the capture of anyone outside
of their little unit, and they can function independently. So this,
you know, this is a very successful strategy. There's the
reason people stick with it. The Serbian government, it seems,
was aware of this force, aware of the Black Hands,
and at least some of its activities, though they may
not have known exactly how many people who were supposed
(18:58):
to be working for the government we're working for the
black Hands. This became a nightmarish time to be a
member of the official government because once upon a time
it was politically dangerous to disagree with the Black Hand,
like disagreeing with a powerful lobbying group and still wanting
to be in politics here, but by it was physically
dangerous because this group saw politically motivated murders as just
(19:19):
another tool, like out there with you know, pamphlets. They
oh and distributed some pamphlets and we had to shoot
this one guy. Don't worry, we made sure everybody knew
it was us. You ever handled a pamphlet, man, those
edges will nick you. They're dangerous. So yeah, I'm sure
there's a statistic about how many people are greviously injured
(19:41):
by pamphlets. If not, then just us putting out into
the ether will mean that it is now created. Someone's
gonna right back to us with information about pamphlets. Oh
my gosh, send us a pamphlet about pamphlets. Any pamphlets
will do, send them more way. So it's commonly believed
you better use legitimate postage. Oh yeah, which we'll get
(20:01):
too later in this episode. So now it is believed
that APIs recruited six Bosnian Serbs for for this assassination attempt,
and he was really hoping to exterminate Franz Ferdinand before
he improved, like we said, the life of the Serbs
in Austria Hungary. And these six men were smuggled across
(20:21):
the border in an arrangement similar to that of the
famous underground railroad, and they were trained in bomb making,
deployment and marksmanship. And now, although the Prime Minister attempted
to stop these guys from leaving the country, the official
government was largely helpless when attempting to oppose these guys.
Though the Black Hand in general and eaten all of
(20:42):
the power structure that existed in the country from within.
The black hand was like this rock that was occurring.
It was a deep state. Yeah, it's the term we
would use today right to this day. Scholars don't agree
on how sincere that Prime Minister's efforts were. Was he
really it was a really a matter of him having
his hands tied, or was he more like Gene Wilder
(21:04):
and Willy Wonka going oh no, stop, oh please, you know,
don't fall in the chocolate. Well, one thing is for sure.
The men, the six terrorists arrived in Sarajevo and kicked
it for a month, waiting for the time to strike,
and absolutely nothing was done to stop them. You gotta
remember it's a little harder to track human beings at
this time, right, Just to give a little bit of that,
(21:27):
like GPS. Yeah yeah, and let's look at the day off.
So a month passes. One of the terrorists, the fellow
named Nadelko, was the first to act. He threw a
bomb at the Archduke's car. There was a guy who
was supposed to throw a bomb earlier, but for some
reason he didn't do it. So he threw the bomb
the Archduke h who was with his pregnant wife at
(21:49):
the time tried to cover her. The driver said some
version of like hot pennies. I don't know. I don't
want to curse on the show, and so he slammed
on the gas and the bomb. Uh. The guy who
threw it forgot that the bomb had a ten second delay,
so it fell off the bumper and hit a car
of completely innocent people happened to be behind the Archduke
and this guy Nadelco had tuberculosis right, and had already
(22:13):
kind of decided this was going to be his last
Terra total suicide mission. So after throwing the bomb, he
swallowed a cyanide pill and to make certainty, died. He also,
this isn't funny, but it's it's it's it's intense. He
also jumped into a nearby river. Unfortunately, the pill did
not work. It only made him sick. And the river
(22:35):
he jumped into because it was a dry season, it
was only a few centimeters deep, and so he got
dragged out of the river and arrested. Talk about a bad,
bad day, wouldn't have been a better day if he
had died. I mean, no, no, we're bad day for him? Yeah, yeah,
fair enough. Now imagine you're one of the other conspirators
(22:56):
who were trying to take this out, And you're like, well,
you just wash all of this go down. If you
watch hit another car. Oh, other dude grabs a cyanide
and then jumps off and then splat and people pull
him out while he's throwing up, and the crowd beat
the living tar out of this man before the police
(23:17):
got to him. So, yeah, you're watching this. Uh, these
these other assassins are watching. They're depressed, they're upset, they
wonder what they should do now. And I'm telling you
guys the god honest truth. One of the terrorists, a
nineteen year old named Gavrilo Princy, was like, forget this,
I'm gonna go get a sandwich. I don't care what
you guys do. I'm gonna get a sandwich. He walked
(23:39):
to the local deli. To be fair, a lot of
historians sawadays say that he knew the route the car
would take and purposely went there to wait. But I
like imagining somebody getting frustrated and going to get a sandwich,
and meanwhile the Archduke, who is understandably p oed uh
(24:00):
insist on continuing his journey go into the hospital. They
want to change the route for safety purposes, but nobody
told the driver. WHOA and to give a shout out
to a fellow podcast When we went to the NYC Podfest,
we saw Aaron from lor do a live reading of
an unpublished he hasn't done this as an episode story
involving this entire fiasco and a haunted car. Um man,
(24:24):
I hope he releases that, because that was the coolest
story told that night. Um. But yeah, so on to
further debacle. So no one told the driver about the
change in the plan. Um, the bodyguard noticed, told the driver,
and the driver decided to turn around. Um. The street
where they turned the car happened to have a deli,
Oh my Goinki Dickens. So it just so happened that
(24:47):
as a particularly depressed assassin have failed Assassin, it would
be Assassin walked out of the deli with his delicious confection.
I wish, I wish history sandwich. I feel like sandwiches
story is it is sort of a lost I feel
like we can learn a lot from the sandwiches of history.
We could have known what was going on in this
(25:07):
man's mind. Yeah. Even the story of condiments is amazing totally.
So he walks out of the Delhi with his mystery
sandwich and what should he see but the Archduke's very
car not ten ft away from his delectable Deli treaty.
The car was at this point stopping and attempting to
(25:28):
reverse directly in front of him. So what happened next?
Matt uh, Yeah, that's when he pulled out his gun
and he fired two times. One the first shot hit
arch Duke, hit him in his neck, in his jugular ye,
so he was going to be done. And the second
one hit the Archduke's pregnant wife in her stomach. And
(25:51):
just to go back to the lower thing. And and
a big part of this guy's stories the unreliable narrator,
so part of the point of the story as he
told it was wasn't clear that every thing was true,
But I liked this detail, the idea that this kid
basically blind fired into a crowd and like managed to
like pop off these two deadly shots. And he attempted
(26:13):
to swallow a cyanide pill as well. This one also
did not work, as where are they getting the cyanide
pills from a person who's really bad at making cyanide pills,
so as he raised his gun to his temple, the
deed was done six temper Tyrannus and all that. So
he's ready to take his own life, but authorities intervened
(26:35):
arrested him before he could shoot himself. Imagine a hand
grabbing the wrist and now it just fires into the air,
and they of course beat the ever loving Christ out
of the guy, but they kept him alive, and they
kept him in jail, and that's when we saw the
immediate aftermath. Things escalated. This is when you start to
(26:57):
see the conspiracy beat skin to be exposed to the authorities,
or at least officially, and the right people are starting
to see it. The inevitable events were all set in motion.
So Germany and Austria Hungary demanded a massive investigation into
what exactly happened, how did this happen and who was involved?
(27:18):
And the Serbian prime minister gave zero. Since we're family show,
I'll say Frank's zero Franks. He gave zero Franks. But
he literally told them that not only did he not
know anything about this plot, but that quote nothing had
been done so far and the matter did not concern
the Serbian government who Germany asked Russia to intercede. Russia
(27:39):
was like yeah, yeah. So then one July, Austria Hungary
issued a letter with ten demands to ensure the destruction
of the anti Austrian network in Serbia, and this document
became known as the July Ultimate Ument. Here are a
few choice excerpts. So they cited earlier international agreements respecting
(28:02):
sovereignty and peaceful relations. They also gave Serbia forty eight
hours to respond. They put a clock on that biz
and then Serbia accepted all but one demand, which was
to allow Austrian military investigators into Serbian territories. But it
turns out there was another conspiracy of play here Austria.
You see, Austria Hungary had absolutely no intention of accepting anything. Uh.
(28:26):
They were set to reject whatever response Serbia gave. And
they were doing this because Germany wanted a full scale
war and this was the perfect opportunity. On July, Austria
Hungary declared war. Hold on, you're saying Germany wanted to
start a world war? Histories long, it is, indeed, why
(28:49):
don't we hear a quick word from our sponsor and
we're back now, Multiple multiple shows have examined World War
One in various facets that have been many wonderful books
(29:10):
written about it. When I said wonderful, I don't mean
they're joy to read. I mean they're very well written. Yeah,
they're full of information. So we're looking at just this
small conspiracy, this this powder keg right and rather than
the war entire So our big question is what became
of the Black Hand. So there were multiple conspirators involved
(29:32):
in this fiasco, and they were exposed, so they were
caught and they served prison time or were executed. So
then towards the end of nineteen sixteen, the Prime Minister
of Servia decided the Hand had outlived its usefulness and
resolved to destroy the organization. Yeah, it seems like such
a difficult thing to do once all of those tendrils
(29:54):
have been released and the cells exist separately, right, I mean,
you can cut off the head, you know, you can
cut off one head of a multi headed monster, and
you know, send a message. And so by nineteen seventeen,
this Prime Minister had arrested a lot of the leaders.
Like you said, you you start taking out the people
(30:14):
who are making decisions, including APIs, the leader of the
Black Hand was subjected to a real life kangaroo court,
and a kangaroo court is much less fun than it sounds. Yep.
Kangaroo court is something where it's a farce rather than
a real legal investigation. So despite the fact that he
and his other co conspirators were very obviously not the
(30:37):
assassins of this other assassination attempt, um, he was convicted
of it, and he, along with three colleagues, was executed
by firing squad in the twenty six of June nineteen seventeen.
And for many um this this is a a significant
(30:58):
ending milestone in the story of the Black Hand, and
increasingly its history continues. You know, this is further and
further and further away from us. Now, if I've done
the math right, no one listening to our show was
around when this happens. I don't want to pigeonhole anybody.
So if you were there firsthand, if you used to
(31:18):
hang out at a sandwich shop in Sarajevo, let us know.
But right now, I mean, we're joking a little bit.
But right now it leads us to the immediate question,
which is why should we still remember this story? Well,
because really this is just one example of how easily
this thing that we call civilization, all of the organization,
(31:38):
all of the uh the working together and the economies
and all of this, how easily it can collapse in
on itself with one small little thing because of disagreements
between groups of people. And there's a big, big difference.
Today our species possesses weapons of war capable of flattening
(31:59):
the planet damn near everything on it. And we're literally
we could be one wrong turn away from that. Yikes.
And you have to imagine this black hand that was
operating inside this government right, um in all parts of
it are a lot of various different parts. You have
(32:19):
to imagine today if you look at we're just gonna
I'm gonna use the United States government in military as
an example because that's where we are. But if there
are small cells, splinter groups that believe very whole, wholeheartedly
a certain way, believe that just as an example, that
(32:40):
the United States should break up again and turn into
independent states. Right, you have a small group of operatives
who exist and they're in high places there in low places,
they're strategically placed throughout the government in the military. That
is a possibility, that's a hypothetical, hypothetical, but that kind
(33:02):
of thing could exist anywhere, and when you bring into play,
like you said, Ben, our technology to destroy the world,
it's pretty terrifying. Yeah, it's it's the problem is not
that it's possible, it's that it's plausible, you know. And
then you know, I think you raised a great point
(33:24):
when you said it's almost it's almost certain that there's
some version of this somewhere that exists now with access
to weapons that people World War One could not imagine.
So if those groups exist, and we're not saying that
we have proof that they do, but if they exist,
what are they up to? Now? That's the stuff they
don't want you to know. And we'd like to know
(33:47):
what you think about this. What lessons can we learn
from the Black Hand do you have? Have you heard
any theories in your neck of the global woods about
the activities of any similar group? And speaking of hearing
from you, that reminds me it's time for shot at Kona.
(34:08):
Our first shout out comes from Lannell. I hope I'm
saying that right, Lennell. If I'm not, I just said
it twice incorrectly, Lenell says, Hi, Ben Mattin Noel, I've
enjoyed your show for some time and finally had an
excuse to write in. I am a chemist working for
a small chemical company, and for many years, one of
my primary jobs was to answer questions from customers. I
(34:29):
got a call several years ago from a man with
a heavy accent looking for red mercury. I had never
heard of this, and the man did not give much
of an explanation about what he was looking for. The
name didn't make sense to me as a chemist, and
the call. It remained a mystery until I listened to
your episode. Now I wonder if I had a conversation
(34:50):
with a would be terrorist. Uh And Lennell says, I
love the show. Please continue exploring the strange ideas out there.
Thank you so much. Yeah, it's interesting to hear from
some firsthand experience of getting a call for red mercury.
You know. And I'm still I still on offense about
(35:12):
that one. Guys, I don't you know, is it all
a shaggy dog story? I am still not sure. So
thank you so much for writing in, Lennel and our
next Our next letter arrives from Jenna. She says, Hi, guys,
I love the podcast, but something really bothered me about
the last episode's shout out corner. I listened to podcast
because you often examine things from multiple sides. The letter
(35:32):
you read about vaping did not do that. It encouraged
people to deny that vaping is dangerous. That is a conspiracy,
and to not believe their doctors. That is not all
the sides. My father and I thought about his smoking
my entire life, and a couple of years ago he
was excited to have almost quit entirely due to vaping.
Only a few months later he died and I was devastated.
(35:53):
It was two days before Christmas. The cause of death
was not being able to fight off pneumonia due to
popcorn lung something and it happens when you smoke vapors.
I was so happy he had quit, and it killed him. Please, please,
please let people know that there are two sides this issue,
and vaping can kill you. Could the tobacco industry be
trying to shut it down? Of course I'm sure they are,
(36:13):
But the reality is the vaping is just as dangerous
as tobacco. I would not want someone else to lose
their father because I said nothing. My father and I
loved history and conspiracy theories. I'm gutted to have found
your podcast after he died. He would have loved it,
and I thank you for getting me through really hard times.
But please, when it comes to issues like this, present
both sides. Thank you. Jenna. Wow, that's terrible, Jenna, sorry
(36:36):
that that happened to your father. That's a reaction to
a letter from a previous episode where someone wrote to
a saying that they think vaping is a conspiracy And
just to jump in here, I did a little bit
of research on this for the research and it appears
that a lot of the issues with vaping arise from
(36:56):
certain food additives, flavorings, and it exists usually in fruity flavors,
and it's not as common, it's not as common as
the chemicals like the deadly chemicals are that exists in cigarettes. Right,
but it's still a problem. And there's no doubt that
(37:19):
when the vape phenomenon kind of hit full bore, that
there wasn't as much oversight of these various products as
the cigarette industry obviously has to deal with um. So
you know, there was a lot of early adopters and
not a lot of research that was available as to
what the actual implications of using These people just automatically
(37:41):
assumed that it's not carcinogenic because it's not you know,
contains not cigarettes, it's not you know, burning carbon monoxide
in your lungs. But study yet, and as we see
little things trickle out, whether it's this popcorn lung study
or whether it's other you know, uh, side effects of vaping.
It takes time, you know, and the cigarette stuty has
(38:03):
been around for a long time. So it's the kind
of thing where we certainly wouldn't have intentionally said one
was better than the other. It's just a matter of
like kind of rolling the dice with anything you put
in your body. Right, that's yeah, And we really appreciated
your letter. Jenna wanted to get it out there because
so often when something is a newer technology and like
(38:27):
the public eye, people tend to um, I don't want
to say deify it, but they tend to look at
it through rose tinted glasses. It's like, this is the
all this is the safe alternative to cigarettes. Fixing a problem, right,
a lot of new technologies are meant to make a
slight adjustment on a problem that exists, and then you
got marketing that just doubles down on that absolutely, you know, so, yeah,
(38:50):
it's I and it's it's definitely a tricky territory. And
I'm I'm sure no one intended to come across as
promoting or anything like that. And as as we always say, listeners,
your choices, of course are your own. It is not
within our purview to tell anyone what to do. What
we do want to assure people that a lot of
(39:11):
advertisements are meant to sell something to you rather than
educate you. Thank you for writing. And then finally we
have a shout out from Dave Um. He says in
your episode about Red Mercury, you guys wondered why bother
to make fakes stamps? Yes, Dave, my hero, tell me
about what is the profit margin of that? Well, aside
from use on postage mass mailing, stamps were once used
(39:34):
as a cash substitute. I personally prefer seashells. That's me
Noel Brown talking, not Dave Um. Accepted by a lot
of mail order concerns for low dollar transactions. You know
that's funny, that makes sense? See that? Yeah, totally so
m hmm. Then, in a letter to the New York Times.
(39:57):
On October tenth, eighteen sixty two, post mass James Wakefield
stated that Congress had authorized quote postal currency to be
issued through the Treasury Department, which later evolved into postal
money orders. So first postal currency was issued in set
dollar amounts, and it was common to use stamps to
make up the sense uh. In addition, the Treasury did
(40:19):
not provide the post Office with sufficient notes for the need.
Although the postmaster noted that postage stamps are made available
for the prepayment of postage only, there were few options,
so this unauthorized use led to the trade of postage stamps,
even though they're only endpoint. Redemption came when used to
mail a letter or package. Um, and that's why you
(40:41):
should all use stamps dot com to matter or package.
We use it around here. So black market for stamps
right with the Kansas all Dave Back to Dave, I'm
speaking as Dave channeling Dave. A black market for stamps
with the cancelations damp washed off developed both for trade
(41:02):
and for postage, being used until they were too damaged
or dirty, so stamps were never printed on special currency
paper or with extra security measures, making counterfeiting easy. It's
hard to believe for us, but small fortunes could be
made on what was basically penny postage. Dave, that was
glorious on so many levels. What a fantastic letter, Just
(41:26):
a history nugget. Stamp frauds a real thing. Yeah, there's
a stamp tycoon now. That's why he should use stamp
fraud dot com for all your postal fraudulent for all
your fraudulent postage needs. I really want to know what
Dave does for a living. He teaches people amazing facts.
Uh does your Thank you very much to Dave, Jenna
(41:48):
and Linnell. This concludes our gosh And if you want
to be like Dave and Lynnell and Jenna and send
us some information, you can find us on Twitter and
Facebook where we are conspiracy stuff. You can share images
with us and what look at pictures of Ben hanging
out in the studio on our Instagram account are still
(42:11):
Noel had some great pictures from an excursion to d
c Y checking out and a book about Tesla. I
saw you post on there. Yeah, we had a book
about Tesla that showed up. We are conspiracy stuff show
on Instagram. Check us out there. If you don't want
to do any of those things, and you just want
to write to us. Please send us an email. We
(42:33):
are conspiracy at how stuff works dot stamp fraud. You
want conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:25):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is known. They called me Ben You of course
are you? And that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Today we're delving into a conspiracy, conspiracy
theory more than one years old, and it's one that
still affects the world today. Something that sounds like a
story just ripped straight from some kind of Tom Clancy
(00:47):
political filler, but it actually happened. Yeah, and a lot
of ways. It's really about this bigger idea that a
single person can, for better or worse, actually change the world.
It's like what you're mom told you, only true. Yeah, Yeah,
it's uh so traveled back with us. Ladies and gentlemen,
(01:08):
Welcome to the early twentieth century. There are all sorts
of dramatic breakthroughs in technology. They are all sorts of
fundamentally historic human moments. But unbeknownst to most, the world
was inching closer and closer to a deadly global conflict.
(01:31):
And it's what we today referred to as World War One.
What was World War One? You ask, Well, we shall
tell you starting with the fact that World War One
began in July of nineteen fourteen and lasted until November
of nineteen eighteen. And during that time, Germany, Austria, Hungary,
Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire also known as the Central Powers,
(01:52):
fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan, and
the United States a k a. The Allied Powers, in
thanks to a lot of this new technology been alluded
to earlier. We're talking about trench warfare, mustard gas, all
kinds of the types of tank that you could build
at that time. Now it's the unprecedented levels. World War
(02:15):
One died of carnage and just human destruction, just utter, utter,
inhumane brutality, atrocities. And by the time this conflict was over,
the ally Powers claimed victory, but it's at best epyric
victory because we're talking about a death toll of more
(02:35):
than sixteen million people, civilians and soldiers alike. I mean,
with the technology that we have now and the way
we can target air strikes, our casualty rates just pale
in comparison. To what we're talking about here. I mean,
this was just astronomical numbers whole buddy. If you think
that European political relations are complicated and screwing, now are
(02:57):
you in for a wild ride. In the early twenties century,
Europe was very much a continent in transition, with a
quagmire of ever shifting alliances, rival powers, and often contradictory aims.
And when I when we say like a continent in transition,
there were powerhouse economies like Austria, Hungary and Germany, and
(03:20):
then there were places like Poland. And this is a
war where occasionally there would be a group of people
with tanks and a group of people on horses, which
is which very strange, sounds like time travel gone wrong.
Even now, a hundred years later, century more later, scholars
and historians continue to debate the causes of this war.
(03:42):
We have a little overview for you of some of
the most often cited contributing factors. One of the biggest ones,
it's this concept of mutual defense agreements. So countries that
have signed contracts, treaties between them where if one nation
gets attacked, the other one will step in to defend it.
Um So you've got all these allied countries that were
(04:02):
required through these contractual agreements to defend other countries. Um,
there were all kinds of alliances. Russia and Serbia, Germany
and Austria, Hungary, France and Russia, Britain and France and
Belgium and Japan and Britain. And you can already see,
or you can imagine, with all of these different groups,
(04:24):
if a single one of these gets attacked, it's going
to create this lethal domino effect. Yea, and and several
are a multiple lists, right Like Russia is on two lists.
They have an agreement with Serbia and France. So I
don't talk about too much of my past. As you
guys know, I was at a time very close to
(04:44):
joining the State Department, before what I would call irreconcilable
creative differences let us apart. And one of the one
of the things that always got me is, although international
relations are very, very complicated, there is one or two
they're a couple of great analogies. And one is although
(05:06):
it can be daunting to hear all these names thrown around,
don't picture these countries as nations. Picture the world as
a house party, and every nation is a person at
this house party and there's a limited amount of beer
or chips, and everybody's making deals with each other to
(05:28):
say how they're going to divide the stuff up right,
and inevitably are they ruffles something goes wrong? Well, of
course they're ruffles. Man, This is a big time. Is
there onion dip? You know that's a good question. Homemade?
You gotta be careful with onion dip? You know it's
not They're not not All onion dips are created equal.
And if you have a good recipe for one, do
send it to us into this description here. Sure. Yeah,
(05:52):
onion dip would be another another resource. Let's say onion
dip was onion dip would be like oil in that case, right,
Beer's oil because there's okay, and they're running out and
you can already see, as Matt said, this lethal domino effect.
So what happened in uh World War one is it's
(06:16):
gonna sound a little bit complicated. We do want to
make sure everybody knows when we say Austria Hungary, it's
with a hyphen because that was one country, all right.
So Austria Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia got involved
because they're type with Serbia. Germany saw Russia mobilizing and
they declared war on Russia, and then France had to
(06:37):
had to hang out because they have an agreement with Russia,
and so they were going against Germany and Austria Hungary.
Germany attacked France through Belgium, and when Belgium got pulled in,
that meant that Britain had to go in, and then
Japan was like also me and then later Italy and
the US would enter, but not at the beginning. That's
just that's just one illustration. That's just one contributing factor,
(06:58):
and there are other ones too. Any of the US
also kind of has always, even like in World War Two,
had this sense that, oh, this isn't for us, this
is we're not, this is that everybody else's problem. We're
kind of listening to it on the radio and hanging back.
But then there's this sense that, oh, crap, maybe maybe
we are going to get pulled into this mess, and
then of course inevitably that's what happens. Yeah, we very
(07:19):
much an isolationist country for a long time, totally just
imagining the house party us just be like, bro, bro,
what are you doing? Bro? And then going in they
have to they have to get involved in the US.
Get your hands off my yetti, bro. The US is
also separated by two oceans and resource rich. So at
(07:39):
this party they're like in somebody else's room, eating their
own food, rubbing their own yettie. They're like, wow, it
sounds rough out there. Yeah, rubbing your yetti is not
a euphemism. Yeah, what is it, yettie? It's a it's
a fancy cooler yea. Yeah, but now that phrase rubbing
(08:00):
her own yetti is gonna stick with people. Hey, what's imperialism?
Good question, Ben, I'm glad you asked. As it turns out,
imperialism as a whole lot like a yetti cooler, not
at all. Though before World War One, you see, Africa
and parts of Asia were points of contention in UM
well among rather the European countries. So many European countries
(08:20):
they sought to expand their spheres of influence by building empires.
So with the U S functioning as an independent entity
all on its own in that isolationist way we just described,
Europeans were forced to make trade deals with US. So
the US, which at the time, and you know, continues
to be quite resource risks is an important source of
(08:41):
natural resources for some of these other countries, so rather
than enjoying the advantages of mercantilism, they had to deal
with like with peers in Africa and Asian societies. However,
this meant that they would continue to bear the brunt
of brutal colonial action in resource extraction. Why pay for
(09:05):
a mind or give people a living wage when you
can go in and plunder and murder them. You know.
It used to be in a hardcore band called Brutal
Colonial Action. Oh yeah, what what instrument did you play?
The muskett? Oh yeah, I'm familiar with your work. Man.
Takes a long time to play, and now it really does. Yeah,
(09:25):
it's like that. It's like you're the guy with the
symbols who's all in every large orchestra, who's just waiting
for that shot. They weren't using muskets in World War One.
You know, we're just time traveling. Man. It's cool. Stuff gets,
you know, stuff gets like woven in. I guarantee you
someone had a musket. I guarantee you're not gonna throw
(09:46):
away perfectly good musket. So the raw materials and the
resources these places could provide. We're seen as crucial to
many European nations, not just for expansion, but for maintenance
and functioning right and increasing competition. This desire for larger
and larger empires led to an increase in military confrontations
(10:08):
and skirmishes, which leads us to another cause. Militarism and
arms race began at the dawn of the twentieth century.
By nineteen fourteen, Germany at the largest build up Great
Britain and Germany really significantly increase their naval forces. And
and this is very important in Germany and Russia especially,
the military became an increasingly dominant force in politics and
(10:32):
public policy, exerting massive influence. And remember when you're a hammer,
everything looks like a nail. Yeah, And then comes in
this wonderful thing called nationalism that is a double edged sword,
but it can do great things as well. Um. So
each of these separate nations wants to be the big potato,
(10:55):
that's not the big pot yeah, you know. They want
to have a large just amount of influence, resource control,
economic wealth within their country and all kinds of trade
with other countries. Like the most delicious Wedges. Yeah, and
they had like the sour cream and the chives. They
may they want to be the big cheese potato. So past,
(11:16):
past wars and all these battles that have occurred throughout
history up until this time had drawn all these national borders.
But in various countries there are ethnic minorities they consider
themselves unfairly lumped into one of these nations, like under
control of perhaps laws that they don't agree with because
that line got drawn. Would that be consimilar to like
(11:37):
the Israeli Palestinian issue? It would be. It would be
similar because there would be people who in the in
the United Nations, maybe maybe another example would be like
the Balkans. But in the United Nations viewing of a country,
it just goes by what everybody else agreed forms the
(11:59):
borders of that kind tree. And for instance, in parts
of the African continent, the borders were specifically and purposely
drawn to separate concentrations of communities or tribes, right, And
that's where you go, That's where you arrive at things
like um, the the war in Rwanda where the Hutu
(12:20):
and the Tutsi had a a brutal, brutal war. That's yeah,
I get that man, that's a great example. It's also
kind of like in India, the border regions of India
and Pakistan. There's all kinds of conflicts that occur there
because of some of these differences. I'll tell you what, though,
that ceremony where they close and open the gate is amazing,
(12:40):
one of my favorite YouTube things to do. Fifteen minutes
long and it's worth every second. So specifically, much of
the origin of World War One was based on the
desire of Slavic people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to break
off from the country of Austria Hungary and become part
of a greater United Serbia, because like, why are you
in control? We're Serbian, We're not Austrian, you know. But
(13:05):
there was one more thing, a match to the powder keg.
With all these burgeoning tensions, rivalries and races for riches,
it seemed Europe was teetering on the brink of calamity
and all it would take it's one more push. That
was the push. Yeah, So actually it was more like
that push, yeah, exactly. Was the assassination of Archduke Franz
(13:27):
Ferdinand on the twenty eighth of June in Can we
just take this opportunity really to say that Franz Ferdinand
was a pretty underrated band. Whatever happened to those guys?
They still around. I wonder if they listened to the show.
They've got to be around, you think, so, Yeah, they're
probably still are in contact with each other. What about
the Arctic Monkeys. They're definitely together. They had a huge
album just a year or two, a couple of years ago.
(13:47):
And I think that one guy might go solo, the
lead monkey, the monkey, the main monkey. Well, anyway, this
bandit and we're talking about get their name from Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated on June in nineteen and
while many of the circumstances leading to the war were
totally in place at this point, um in the war
(14:10):
may have at this we've ultimately been considered to be inevitable.
The death of this single elite aristocrat was the match
that lit the fuse of aforementioned powder keg Yes, the
feather that broke the camel's back, the penny that shattered
the train station, The badger that broke out of the
(14:33):
bag and massacred everyone. Yeah, yep, the final potato they
got microwaved a little too long. Nope, No, not that one. No,
keep it the dog who kept barking at the son
of Sam. All right. So this death was the result
of one of the westerns world's most significant conspiracies. Have
(14:53):
you heard of the Black Hand, Well you will hear
about it right after a word from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. The Black Hand, also known as
Unification or Death, was a secret military society formed in
(15:17):
May of nineteen eleven by officers in the army of
the Kingdom of Serbia. They were hell bent or leather
on uniting all of the territories with a South Slavik
majority not ruled by either Serbia or Montenegro. The precursor
of this secret group it already assassinated the Serbian royal
(15:38):
couple in h three. Both the Black Hand and its
precursor were led by a fellow named Captain Draguten Dmitrievich,
often called by the code name at This, which is
a god from Egyptian mythology. And I do want to
say that none of us are Serbians, so we are
(15:58):
not going to pronoun ounce these names as native speakers. Yes,
thank you, Ben, you're correct. So what is this Black Hand? Conspiracy,
although other than sounding like an amazing band name. Well, okay,
so then you have to go back to nineteen eleven,
and that's when this group tried to assassinate Franz Joseph.
(16:20):
He was the current at that time ruler of Austria Hungary.
Um the student. He's an old gentleman, he's in his eighties,
and for a couple of reasons, they failed. And then
they turned their attention to this dude's heir, who was
Franz Ferdinand. Yes, this is this is a tricky part
of history, so apiss APIs the captain, the leader of
(16:45):
the Black Hand, wanted Franz Ferdinand dead, not because he
was oppressing the Slavic minority living in his kingdom under
his rule, but because he was planning to make important
concessions to the South Slavs that you can rolled. This
would make the Black Hand's dream of a unified Serbia
much much more difficult. Why would you throw a revolution
(17:06):
if your home country is making improvements on its own. Yeah,
they're just seeing or they're imagining, they're gonna be these
small incremental moves right that It's going to take idle decades,
maybe centuries to get what they want, Let's do it quickly.
Pull that band aid off. And the Black Hand was
not acting alone. They worked in concert with another group
named No Rodna Old Browna and its satellite organizations, particularly
(17:31):
a group named Young Bosnia. The Roda Bruna was older
and more established, so this gave the Black Hand massive
street cred. So by nine fourteen UM the conspiracy had
at large to a membership including hundreds of individuals, many
of whom were officers in the Serbian Army. They trained
(17:51):
guerilla fighters and taught saboteurs, similar in many ways to
the way current intelligence agencies trained revolutionaries in other country.
And it's not easy to keep an international revolutionary terrorists
freedom fighter organization ring a secret. It's hard takes the
work of many so members had very little knowledge of
the overall organization. It was on a need to know basis.
(18:14):
They would know only the member of their cell and
one superior who gave them orders. Yeah, it feels a
lot like secret societies that we looked into in the past,
or possibly the way modern day terrorist seals are operated
in the government the military, Like you may not know
who's functioning. They're called seals because their self contained, right,
They don't have a line to others, They cannot give
(18:35):
information that would lead to the capture of anyone outside
of their little unit, and they can function independently. So this,
you know, this is a very successful strategy. There's the
reason people stick with it. The Serbian government, it seems,
was aware of this force, aware of the Black Hands,
and at least some of its activities, though they may
not have known exactly how many people who were supposed
(18:58):
to be working for the government we're working for the
black Hands. This became a nightmarish time to be a
member of the official government because once upon a time
it was politically dangerous to disagree with the Black Hand,
like disagreeing with a powerful lobbying group and still wanting
to be in politics here, but by it was physically
dangerous because this group saw politically motivated murders as just
(19:19):
another tool, like out there with you know, pamphlets. They
oh and distributed some pamphlets and we had to shoot
this one guy. Don't worry, we made sure everybody knew
it was us. You ever handled a pamphlet, man, those
edges will nick you. They're dangerous. So yeah, I'm sure
there's a statistic about how many people are greviously injured
(19:41):
by pamphlets. If not, then just us putting out into
the ether will mean that it is now created. Someone's
gonna right back to us with information about pamphlets. Oh
my gosh, send us a pamphlet about pamphlets. Any pamphlets
will do, send them more way. So it's commonly believed
you better use legitimate postage. Oh yeah, which we'll get
(20:01):
too later in this episode. So now it is believed
that APIs recruited six Bosnian Serbs for for this assassination attempt,
and he was really hoping to exterminate Franz Ferdinand before
he improved, like we said, the life of the Serbs
in Austria Hungary. And these six men were smuggled across
(20:21):
the border in an arrangement similar to that of the
famous underground railroad, and they were trained in bomb making,
deployment and marksmanship. And now, although the Prime Minister attempted
to stop these guys from leaving the country, the official
government was largely helpless when attempting to oppose these guys.
Though the Black Hand in general and eaten all of
(20:42):
the power structure that existed in the country from within.
The black hand was like this rock that was occurring.
It was a deep state. Yeah, it's the term we
would use today right to this day. Scholars don't agree
on how sincere that Prime Minister's efforts were. Was he
really it was a really a matter of him having
his hands tied, or was he more like Gene Wilder
(21:04):
and Willy Wonka going oh no, stop, oh please, you know,
don't fall in the chocolate. Well, one thing is for sure.
The men, the six terrorists arrived in Sarajevo and kicked
it for a month, waiting for the time to strike,
and absolutely nothing was done to stop them. You gotta
remember it's a little harder to track human beings at
this time, right, Just to give a little bit of that,
(21:27):
like GPS. Yeah yeah, and let's look at the day off.
So a month passes. One of the terrorists, the fellow
named Nadelko, was the first to act. He threw a
bomb at the Archduke's car. There was a guy who
was supposed to throw a bomb earlier, but for some
reason he didn't do it. So he threw the bomb
the Archduke h who was with his pregnant wife at
(21:49):
the time tried to cover her. The driver said some
version of like hot pennies. I don't know. I don't
want to curse on the show, and so he slammed
on the gas and the bomb. Uh. The guy who
threw it forgot that the bomb had a ten second delay,
so it fell off the bumper and hit a car
of completely innocent people happened to be behind the Archduke
and this guy Nadelco had tuberculosis right, and had already
(22:13):
kind of decided this was going to be his last
Terra total suicide mission. So after throwing the bomb, he
swallowed a cyanide pill and to make certainty, died. He also,
this isn't funny, but it's it's it's it's intense. He
also jumped into a nearby river. Unfortunately, the pill did
not work. It only made him sick. And the river
(22:35):
he jumped into because it was a dry season, it
was only a few centimeters deep, and so he got
dragged out of the river and arrested. Talk about a bad,
bad day, wouldn't have been a better day if he
had died. I mean, no, no, we're bad day for him? Yeah, yeah,
fair enough. Now imagine you're one of the other conspirators
(22:56):
who were trying to take this out, And you're like, well,
you just wash all of this go down. If you
watch hit another car. Oh, other dude grabs a cyanide
and then jumps off and then splat and people pull
him out while he's throwing up, and the crowd beat
the living tar out of this man before the police
(23:17):
got to him. So, yeah, you're watching this. Uh, these
these other assassins are watching. They're depressed, they're upset, they
wonder what they should do now. And I'm telling you
guys the god honest truth. One of the terrorists, a
nineteen year old named Gavrilo Princy, was like, forget this,
I'm gonna go get a sandwich. I don't care what
you guys do. I'm gonna get a sandwich. He walked
(23:39):
to the local deli. To be fair, a lot of
historians sawadays say that he knew the route the car
would take and purposely went there to wait. But I
like imagining somebody getting frustrated and going to get a sandwich,
and meanwhile the Archduke, who is understandably p oed uh
(24:00):
insist on continuing his journey go into the hospital. They
want to change the route for safety purposes, but nobody
told the driver. WHOA and to give a shout out
to a fellow podcast When we went to the NYC Podfest,
we saw Aaron from lor do a live reading of
an unpublished he hasn't done this as an episode story
involving this entire fiasco and a haunted car. Um man,
(24:24):
I hope he releases that, because that was the coolest
story told that night. Um. But yeah, so on to
further debacle. So no one told the driver about the
change in the plan. Um, the bodyguard noticed, told the driver,
and the driver decided to turn around. Um. The street
where they turned the car happened to have a deli,
Oh my Goinki Dickens. So it just so happened that
(24:47):
as a particularly depressed assassin have failed Assassin, it would
be Assassin walked out of the deli with his delicious confection.
I wish, I wish history sandwich. I feel like sandwiches
story is it is sort of a lost I feel
like we can learn a lot from the sandwiches of history.
We could have known what was going on in this
(25:07):
man's mind. Yeah. Even the story of condiments is amazing totally.
So he walks out of the Delhi with his mystery
sandwich and what should he see but the Archduke's very
car not ten ft away from his delectable Deli treaty.
The car was at this point stopping and attempting to
(25:28):
reverse directly in front of him. So what happened next?
Matt uh, Yeah, that's when he pulled out his gun
and he fired two times. One the first shot hit
arch Duke, hit him in his neck, in his jugular ye,
so he was going to be done. And the second
one hit the Archduke's pregnant wife in her stomach. And
(25:51):
just to go back to the lower thing. And and
a big part of this guy's stories the unreliable narrator,
so part of the point of the story as he
told it was wasn't clear that every thing was true,
But I liked this detail, the idea that this kid
basically blind fired into a crowd and like managed to
like pop off these two deadly shots. And he attempted
(26:13):
to swallow a cyanide pill as well. This one also
did not work, as where are they getting the cyanide
pills from a person who's really bad at making cyanide pills,
so as he raised his gun to his temple, the
deed was done six temper Tyrannus and all that. So
he's ready to take his own life, but authorities intervened
(26:35):
arrested him before he could shoot himself. Imagine a hand
grabbing the wrist and now it just fires into the air,
and they of course beat the ever loving Christ out
of the guy, but they kept him alive, and they
kept him in jail, and that's when we saw the
immediate aftermath. Things escalated. This is when you start to
(26:57):
see the conspiracy beat skin to be exposed to the authorities,
or at least officially, and the right people are starting
to see it. The inevitable events were all set in motion.
So Germany and Austria Hungary demanded a massive investigation into
what exactly happened, how did this happen and who was involved?
(27:18):
And the Serbian prime minister gave zero. Since we're family show,
I'll say Frank's zero Franks. He gave zero Franks. But
he literally told them that not only did he not
know anything about this plot, but that quote nothing had
been done so far and the matter did not concern
the Serbian government who Germany asked Russia to intercede. Russia
(27:39):
was like yeah, yeah. So then one July, Austria Hungary
issued a letter with ten demands to ensure the destruction
of the anti Austrian network in Serbia, and this document
became known as the July Ultimate Ument. Here are a
few choice excerpts. So they cited earlier international agreements respecting
(28:02):
sovereignty and peaceful relations. They also gave Serbia forty eight
hours to respond. They put a clock on that biz
and then Serbia accepted all but one demand, which was
to allow Austrian military investigators into Serbian territories. But it
turns out there was another conspiracy of play here Austria.
You see, Austria Hungary had absolutely no intention of accepting anything. Uh.
(28:26):
They were set to reject whatever response Serbia gave. And
they were doing this because Germany wanted a full scale
war and this was the perfect opportunity. On July, Austria
Hungary declared war. Hold on, you're saying Germany wanted to
start a world war? Histories long, it is, indeed, why
(28:49):
don't we hear a quick word from our sponsor and
we're back now, Multiple multiple shows have examined World War
One in various facets that have been many wonderful books
(29:10):
written about it. When I said wonderful, I don't mean
they're joy to read. I mean they're very well written. Yeah,
they're full of information. So we're looking at just this
small conspiracy, this this powder keg right and rather than
the war entire So our big question is what became
of the Black Hand. So there were multiple conspirators involved
(29:32):
in this fiasco, and they were exposed, so they were
caught and they served prison time or were executed. So
then towards the end of nineteen sixteen, the Prime Minister
of Servia decided the Hand had outlived its usefulness and
resolved to destroy the organization. Yeah, it seems like such
a difficult thing to do once all of those tendrils
(29:54):
have been released and the cells exist separately, right, I mean,
you can cut off the head, you know, you can
cut off one head of a multi headed monster, and
you know, send a message. And so by nineteen seventeen,
this Prime Minister had arrested a lot of the leaders.
Like you said, you you start taking out the people
(30:14):
who are making decisions, including APIs, the leader of the
Black Hand was subjected to a real life kangaroo court,
and a kangaroo court is much less fun than it sounds. Yep.
Kangaroo court is something where it's a farce rather than
a real legal investigation. So despite the fact that he
and his other co conspirators were very obviously not the
(30:37):
assassins of this other assassination attempt, um, he was convicted
of it, and he, along with three colleagues, was executed
by firing squad in the twenty six of June nineteen seventeen.
And for many um this this is a a significant
(30:58):
ending milestone in the story of the Black Hand, and
increasingly its history continues. You know, this is further and
further and further away from us. Now, if I've done
the math right, no one listening to our show was
around when this happens. I don't want to pigeonhole anybody.
So if you were there firsthand, if you used to
(31:18):
hang out at a sandwich shop in Sarajevo, let us know.
But right now, I mean, we're joking a little bit.
But right now it leads us to the immediate question,
which is why should we still remember this story? Well,
because really this is just one example of how easily
this thing that we call civilization, all of the organization,
(31:38):
all of the uh the working together and the economies
and all of this, how easily it can collapse in
on itself with one small little thing because of disagreements
between groups of people. And there's a big, big difference.
Today our species possesses weapons of war capable of flattening
(31:59):
the planet damn near everything on it. And we're literally
we could be one wrong turn away from that. Yikes.
And you have to imagine this black hand that was
operating inside this government right, um in all parts of
it are a lot of various different parts. You have
(32:19):
to imagine today if you look at we're just gonna
I'm gonna use the United States government in military as
an example because that's where we are. But if there
are small cells, splinter groups that believe very whole, wholeheartedly
a certain way, believe that just as an example, that
(32:40):
the United States should break up again and turn into
independent states. Right, you have a small group of operatives
who exist and they're in high places there in low places,
they're strategically placed throughout the government in the military. That
is a possibility, that's a hypothetical, hypothetical, but that kind
(33:02):
of thing could exist anywhere, and when you bring into play,
like you said, Ben, our technology to destroy the world,
it's pretty terrifying. Yeah, it's it's the problem is not
that it's possible, it's that it's plausible, you know. And
then you know, I think you raised a great point
(33:24):
when you said it's almost it's almost certain that there's
some version of this somewhere that exists now with access
to weapons that people World War One could not imagine.
So if those groups exist, and we're not saying that
we have proof that they do, but if they exist,
what are they up to? Now? That's the stuff they
don't want you to know. And we'd like to know
(33:47):
what you think about this. What lessons can we learn
from the Black Hand do you have? Have you heard
any theories in your neck of the global woods about
the activities of any similar group? And speaking of hearing
from you, that reminds me it's time for shot at Kona.
(34:08):
Our first shout out comes from Lannell. I hope I'm
saying that right, Lennell. If I'm not, I just said
it twice incorrectly, Lenell says, Hi, Ben Mattin Noel, I've
enjoyed your show for some time and finally had an
excuse to write in. I am a chemist working for
a small chemical company, and for many years, one of
my primary jobs was to answer questions from customers. I
(34:29):
got a call several years ago from a man with
a heavy accent looking for red mercury. I had never
heard of this, and the man did not give much
of an explanation about what he was looking for. The
name didn't make sense to me as a chemist, and
the call. It remained a mystery until I listened to
your episode. Now I wonder if I had a conversation
(34:50):
with a would be terrorist. Uh And Lennell says, I
love the show. Please continue exploring the strange ideas out there.
Thank you so much. Yeah, it's interesting to hear from
some firsthand experience of getting a call for red mercury.
You know. And I'm still I still on offense about
(35:12):
that one. Guys, I don't you know, is it all
a shaggy dog story? I am still not sure. So
thank you so much for writing in, Lennel and our
next Our next letter arrives from Jenna. She says, Hi, guys,
I love the podcast, but something really bothered me about
the last episode's shout out corner. I listened to podcast
because you often examine things from multiple sides. The letter
(35:32):
you read about vaping did not do that. It encouraged
people to deny that vaping is dangerous. That is a conspiracy,
and to not believe their doctors. That is not all
the sides. My father and I thought about his smoking
my entire life, and a couple of years ago he
was excited to have almost quit entirely due to vaping.
Only a few months later he died and I was devastated.
(35:53):
It was two days before Christmas. The cause of death
was not being able to fight off pneumonia due to
popcorn lung something and it happens when you smoke vapors.
I was so happy he had quit, and it killed him. Please, please,
please let people know that there are two sides this issue,
and vaping can kill you. Could the tobacco industry be
trying to shut it down? Of course I'm sure they are,
(36:13):
But the reality is the vaping is just as dangerous
as tobacco. I would not want someone else to lose
their father because I said nothing. My father and I
loved history and conspiracy theories. I'm gutted to have found
your podcast after he died. He would have loved it,
and I thank you for getting me through really hard times.
But please, when it comes to issues like this, present
both sides. Thank you. Jenna. Wow, that's terrible, Jenna, sorry
(36:36):
that that happened to your father. That's a reaction to
a letter from a previous episode where someone wrote to
a saying that they think vaping is a conspiracy And
just to jump in here, I did a little bit
of research on this for the research and it appears
that a lot of the issues with vaping arise from
(36:56):
certain food additives, flavorings, and it exists usually in fruity flavors,
and it's not as common, it's not as common as
the chemicals like the deadly chemicals are that exists in cigarettes. Right,
but it's still a problem. And there's no doubt that
(37:19):
when the vape phenomenon kind of hit full bore, that
there wasn't as much oversight of these various products as
the cigarette industry obviously has to deal with um. So
you know, there was a lot of early adopters and
not a lot of research that was available as to
what the actual implications of using These people just automatically
(37:41):
assumed that it's not carcinogenic because it's not you know,
contains not cigarettes, it's not you know, burning carbon monoxide
in your lungs. But study yet, and as we see
little things trickle out, whether it's this popcorn lung study
or whether it's other you know, uh, side effects of vaping.
It takes time, you know, and the cigarette stuty has
(38:03):
been around for a long time. So it's the kind
of thing where we certainly wouldn't have intentionally said one
was better than the other. It's just a matter of
like kind of rolling the dice with anything you put
in your body. Right, that's yeah, And we really appreciated
your letter. Jenna wanted to get it out there because
so often when something is a newer technology and like
(38:27):
the public eye, people tend to um, I don't want
to say deify it, but they tend to look at
it through rose tinted glasses. It's like, this is the
all this is the safe alternative to cigarettes. Fixing a problem, right,
a lot of new technologies are meant to make a
slight adjustment on a problem that exists, and then you
got marketing that just doubles down on that absolutely, you know, so, yeah,
(38:50):
it's I and it's it's definitely a tricky territory. And
I'm I'm sure no one intended to come across as
promoting or anything like that. And as as we always say, listeners,
your choices, of course are your own. It is not
within our purview to tell anyone what to do. What
we do want to assure people that a lot of
(39:11):
advertisements are meant to sell something to you rather than
educate you. Thank you for writing. And then finally we
have a shout out from Dave Um. He says in
your episode about Red Mercury, you guys wondered why bother
to make fakes stamps? Yes, Dave, my hero, tell me
about what is the profit margin of that? Well, aside
from use on postage mass mailing, stamps were once used
(39:34):
as a cash substitute. I personally prefer seashells. That's me
Noel Brown talking, not Dave Um. Accepted by a lot
of mail order concerns for low dollar transactions. You know
that's funny, that makes sense? See that? Yeah, totally so
m hmm. Then, in a letter to the New York Times.
(39:57):
On October tenth, eighteen sixty two, post mass James Wakefield
stated that Congress had authorized quote postal currency to be
issued through the Treasury Department, which later evolved into postal
money orders. So first postal currency was issued in set
dollar amounts, and it was common to use stamps to
make up the sense uh. In addition, the Treasury did
(40:19):
not provide the post Office with sufficient notes for the need.
Although the postmaster noted that postage stamps are made available
for the prepayment of postage only, there were few options,
so this unauthorized use led to the trade of postage stamps,
even though they're only endpoint. Redemption came when used to
mail a letter or package. Um, and that's why you
(40:41):
should all use stamps dot com to matter or package.
We use it around here. So black market for stamps
right with the Kansas all Dave Back to Dave, I'm
speaking as Dave channeling Dave. A black market for stamps
with the cancelations damp washed off developed both for trade
(41:02):
and for postage, being used until they were too damaged
or dirty, so stamps were never printed on special currency
paper or with extra security measures, making counterfeiting easy. It's
hard to believe for us, but small fortunes could be
made on what was basically penny postage. Dave, that was
glorious on so many levels. What a fantastic letter, Just
(41:26):
a history nugget. Stamp frauds a real thing. Yeah, there's
a stamp tycoon now. That's why he should use stamp
fraud dot com for all your postal fraudulent for all
your fraudulent postage needs. I really want to know what
Dave does for a living. He teaches people amazing facts.
Uh does your Thank you very much to Dave, Jenna
(41:48):
and Linnell. This concludes our gosh And if you want
to be like Dave and Lynnell and Jenna and send
us some information, you can find us on Twitter and
Facebook where we are conspiracy stuff. You can share images
with us and what look at pictures of Ben hanging
out in the studio on our Instagram account are still
(42:11):
Noel had some great pictures from an excursion to d
c Y checking out and a book about Tesla. I
saw you post on there. Yeah, we had a book
about Tesla that showed up. We are conspiracy stuff show
on Instagram. Check us out there. If you don't want
to do any of those things, and you just want
to write to us. Please send us an email. We
(42:33):
are conspiracy at how stuff works dot stamp fraud. You
want conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com