Vienna - Not a good place to be in 1913.
Back in 1913, although they didn’t know it at the time, the deadliest city to live in was Vienna. In that year several people of note were residents. First off was Sigmund Freud. How could Freud contribute to a city being deadly you ask? Well, he was known to prescribe cocaine to his patients. How many died from an exploded heart, OD, or other drug related cause?
But Freud was only the tip of the iceberg.
You see, also living in Vienna was the Emperor Franz Joseph who led the Austro Hungarian Empire. They were one of the main belligerents in the forthcoming war. His nephew, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived there as well. And it was his death that sparked the hostilities.
Another resident was Joseph Tito. He was not a nice guy. Although, as far as dictators go, he was actually a fairly decent one. He led Yugoslavia as a communist ‘President for Life’, but he disagreed with Stalin. While he did oppress his people, he rarely had them executed just for disagreeing with the government. He has been called a “Benevolent Dictator”.
Also living in Vienna was Leon Trotsky. He was that guy, you remember him right? He was the guy who helped start the revolution in Russia that overthrew the Tsar and resulted in that other guy becoming leader of Russia. What was his name?
Oh yeah, Joseph Stalin. Because of his radical communist beliefs, Stalin was in a self-exile in Vienna in 1913.
And living just 2 miles from Stalin was his good friend, Adolf Hitler.
So, in 1913, these few men who all lived within a 2 mile radius of each other, were responsible for over 80,000,000 dead people.
Talk about the wrong side of the tracks.....
This post was extracted from -->
http://whitenoise.kinja.com/otters-oddities-1760702956