Lusitania Sinking

The Kaiser and his U-Boats were defeated. Never again was a passenger ship like the Lusitania sunk during war.

At the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month in 1918, an Armistice stopped the fighting. The actual treaty ending the war came months later.

Contemporary sources, such as this extract taken from a July 1919 report on U.S. public opinion regarding the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, indicate Americans longed for the conflict to be over:

They are tired of the war and everything belonging to it. They are almost hysterically anxious to get back to peace conditions, and they cannot quite understand why the process takes such a long time.

Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles in the beautiful Hall of Mirrors. The terms were extremely harsh for Germany, including significant territory loss.

Germans were not pleased. Resentment of the Versailles Treaty smouldered within many people. One person in particular - an Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler - vowed to do something about it.

Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, one could fairly say that Gavrilo Princip pulled more than the trigger of the gun that killed the Archduke and his wife. He also:

• Pulled the trigger of the First World War
  
  
• Which led to the Treaty of Versailles
  
  
• Which led to Hitler's resentment of the treaty
  
  
• Which led to the formation of the Nazi Party
  
  
• Which led to the Second World War.
  

It isn't often that a long-forgotten person was the one who set in motion so many cataclysmic events.

NOTE: If you would like to know more about the Lusitania, check out this terrific web site. If you would like to review documents and photographs from World War I, visit the archives at Brigham Young University.