April 22, 2013
Astounding death car
(Mike Dash)
In closing, though, I want to draw attention to an even more astounding coincidence concerning Franz Ferdinand's death limo - one that is considerably better evidenced than the cursed-car nonsense. This tiny piece of history went completely unremarked on for the best part of a century, until a British visitor named Brian Presland called at Vienna's Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, where the vehicle is now on display. It was Presland who seems to have first drawn the staff's attention to the remarkable detail contained in the Gräf & Stift's license plate, which reads AIII 118.
That number, Presland pointed out, is capable of a quite astonishing interpretation. It 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 of Sarajevo that in a real sense marked the beginning of the First World War, but of November 11, 1918: Armistice Day, the day that the war ended.
This coincidence is so incredible that I initially suspected that it might be a hoax - that perhaps the Gräf & Stift had been fitted with the plate retrospectively. A couple of things suggest that this is not the case, however. First, the pregnant meaning of the intitial 'A' applies only in English - the German for "armistice" is Waffenstillstand, a satisfyingly Teutonic-sounding mouthful that literally translates as "arms standstill." And Austria-Hungary did not surrender on the same day as its German allies - it had been knocked out of the war a week earlier, on November 4, 1918. So the number plate is a little bit less spooky in its native country, and so far as I can make it out it also contains not five number 1's, but three capital 'I's and two numbers. Perhaps, then, it's not quite so perplexing that the museum director buttonholed by Brian Presland said he had worked in the place for 20 years without spotting the plate's significance.
More important, however, a contemporary photo of the fateful limousine, taken just as it turned into the road where Gavrilo Princip was waiting for it, some 30 seconds before Franz Ferdinand's death, shows the car bearing what looks very much like the same number plate as it does today. You're going to have to take my word for this - the plate is visible, just, in the best-quality copy of the image that I have access to, and I have been able to read it with a magnifying glass. But my attempts to scan this tiny detail in high definition have been unsuccessful. I'm satisfied, though, and while I don't pretend that this is anything but a quite incredible coincidence, it certainly is incredible, one of the most jaw-dropping I've ever come across.
Fonte:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/2013/04/archduke-franz-ferdinand-and-his-astounding-death-car
Mais:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/world-war-i-special-report-180952176
