Franz Ferdinands 'spooky' registration.

It's hard to think of another event in the troubled twentieth century that had quite the implications of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The Archduke was heir to the throne of the tottering Austro Hungarian empire; his killers, a motley band of amateurish students, were Serbian nationalists (or possibly Yugoslav nationalists; historians remain divided on the topic) who wanted to turn Austrian Bosnia into a part of a new Slav state.

Of all the tall tales that attached themselves to Franz Ferdinand after his death, the best known and most widely circulated concerns the car in which he was driven to his death. This vehicle, a Graf und Stift double phaeton, built by the Graf brothers of Vienna, had been made in 1910 and was owned not by the Austro Hungarian state but by Count Franz von Harrach, "an officer of the Austrian army transport corps" who apparently loaned it to the Archduke for his day in Sarajevo. According to this legend, Von Harrach's vehicle was so cursed by either [a] its involvement in the awful events of June 1914 or [b] its gaudy blood-red paint job that pretty much every subsequent owner met a hideous, sort of end.

One piece of history went completely unremarked on for almost a century, until a British visitor to the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, where the car now resides, noticed the number plates. Brian Presland seems to have been first to draw the staff's attention to the remarkable detail contained in the Graf und Stift's registration plate, which reads 'AIII 118'. That number, Presland pointed out, can be taken to read A (for Armistice) 11 / 11 / 18, which means that the death car has always carried with it a prediction, not of the dreadful day in Sarajevo that marked the beginning of the First World War, but of 11 November 1918: Armistice Day, the day that the war ended.

A couple of things suggest that this is not the case, though. Firstly, the meaning of the intitial 'A' applies only in English as the German for 'armistice' is 'Waffenstillstand,' and secondly, Austria Hungary did not surrender on the same day as its German allies anyway. It had been knocked out of the war a week earlier, on 4 November 1918. So the number plate is a little bit less spooky in its native country. It also contains not five number '1's but three capital 'I's and two numbers. Perhaps it's not quite so surprising that the museum director first approached by Brian Presland freely admitted that he had worked in the place for 20 years without spotting the plates significance.



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