Blood on their hands. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

You might be familiar with the name Franz Ferdinand, not the Scottish rock band but the Austrian

Prince. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Karl Ludwig Joseph Maria of Austria, who was the air

presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary. And if you were paying attention in high school

history class, his assassination in Sarajevo was the most immediate cause of World War I.

But did you know that a secret society was in play for this crucial event that would change

the world forever? I bet you didn't. Today we're talking about a hyper-problematic secret

Serbian military society called Unification or Death, popularly known as the Black Hand.

Unification or Death or the Black Hand was formed in 1901 by officers in the Army of the Kingdom

of Serbia to create a Serbian independence on their own oppressive terms. I want to emphasize

these people were not good people. They were bad people. But still revolutionaries and with that

very ambitious revolutionaries. The Black Hand's first big military move was in 1903 called the

Meku. The Meku was a coup d'etat led by then-captain Dragotin Dmitriovic against Serbian king Alexander

Obranovic and his queen Draga, who were ambushed in the royal palace of Belgrade and killed.

This double murder resulted in the extinction of the Obranovic dynasty, an old guard royal line

which had ruled the Kingdom of Serbia since the middle of the 19th century. But it didn't really

work. After the Meku, Serbia was not made independent. Instead, the throne passed to King Peter

I of Serbia. Let's take a break. The Black Hand society's main aim was to unite all the territories

of Serbia with a South Slavic majority, creating albeit with narrow ideologies and independent state,

taking inspiration primarily from the very violent unification of Italy and Germany.

The group encompassed a range of outlooks, from conspiratorially minded army officers to

idealistic youths, but tended towards republicanism despite their nationalistic ambitions.

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