Given a chance would you kill baby Hitler?

[abaris]

New thread, if given the chance would you save Franz Ferdinand and would it have changed everything

I'm rather sure of that. Franz Ferdiand had a lot of flaws, but what he got right was seeking equal representation and rights for the slavs. It put him in opposition to the Hungarians, thereby opening a whole new can of wirms, but WWI wouldn't have happened, as and when it happened. Even more so, if he survived his uncle and took the throne. Franz Josef was, by all accounts, a rather mild and benevolent ruler, who overturned most death sentences and even refrained from criticizing artists after one of them commited suicide after the emperor said he didn't like his work. He even refused to fire a personal servant, who was so drunk every morning that he couldn't attend to his duties anymore, out of fear, the servant would land on the streets penniless. He also refused three times to appoint mayor elect of Vienna Karl Lueger because of his antisemitism. But he was also a staunch catholic conservative, who believed in his god given right to rule.

Franz Ferdinand was very different. A brute, but a realistic one. He saw the only chance for survival of the empire in granting equal rights to every ethnicity within the country. It might have bought a few decades.