Assassination in Sarajevo

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg were shot to death in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Gavrilo Princip, a member of Young Bosnia, a group aiming at the unification of the South Slavs. The event sparked off the outbreak of World War I. (See: Causes of World War I).

Background

Bosnia and Herzegovina had been occupied by Austria-Hungary in 1878 and annexed in 1908. Many Bosnians, particularly Bosnian Serbs, resented the occupation, preferring unification with Serbia. The possibility of Austria-Hungary granting Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia and establishing the Triune Monarchy of Austria-Hungary-Croatia fueled resentment among Serbs.

In late June 1914, Franz Ferdinand visited Bosnia in order to observe military maneuvers and to open a museum in Sarajevo. Normally he would not be accompanied on official occasions by his morganatic wife Sophie, since she did not have the same precedence at court as her husband. But since July 1 was the couple's wedding anniversary, Sophie was on this occasion allowed to travel with her husband.

The day of the assassination, June 28, is June 15 in the Julian calendar, the feast of St. Vitus. In Serbia, it is called Vidovdan and commemorates a 1389 defeat of Serbia by the Ottomans; it is an occasion for patriotic observances.

Conspiracy

Young Bosnia, a group of young Bosnian anarchists, were equipped with Fabrique Nationale de Herstal model 1910 pistols and bombs supplied by the Black Hand, a strongly nationalistic Serbian secret society which included Serbian army officers, most notably Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, who headed Serbian Military Intelligence, and had been a leader in the coup that killed King Aleksandar Obrenović eleven years before.

The level of involvement of the Black Hand is disputed. Some believe that it directly organized the attack and that Young Bosnia was in fact a subsidiary organization. Others point out that Young Bosnia was ideologically different from the Black Hand and its members so inexperienced that the Black Handers never really believed the attempt would be successful. Most historians do however agree that the Black Hand supplied the weapons and cyanide to the assassins.

Direct links between the actual Serbian Government and the terrorist conspiracy action have never been proved. The Serbian authorities appear to have tried to pass on an oblique warning through their Ambassador in Vienna, to avoid provoking Austro-Hungary in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. This warning (to the general effect that a formal visit by the Austrian heir apparent to the disputed territory of Bosnia Herzegovina could be dangerous at that time) was disregarded. Another theory postulates the involvement of the Okhrana with the Black Hand.

The assassination

Note: The exact course of events was never firmly established, mostly due to inconsistent stories of witnesses.

The seven young conspirators were inexperienced with weapons, and it was only due to an extraordinary sequences of events that they were successful. Around 10:00 Franz Ferdinand, his wife and their party left the Philipovic army camp, where he had undertaken a brief review of the troops. The motorcade consisted of seven cars:

In the first car: the chief detective of Sarajevo and three local police officers.
In the second car: Sarajevo's Mayor, Fehim Efendi Curcic; Sarajevo's Commissioner of Police, Dr. Edmund Gerde.
In the third car: Franz Ferdinand; his wife Sophie; Bosnia's Governor General Oskar Potiorek; Franz Ferdinand's bodyguard Lieutenant Colonel Count Franz von Harrach.
In the fourth car: the head of Franz Ferdinand's military chancery, Baron Carl von Rumerskirch; Sophie's lady-in-waiting Countess Wilma Lanyus von Wellenberg; Potiorek's chief adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Erich Edler von Merizzi; Lieutenant Colonel Count Alexander Boos-Waldeck.
In the fifth car: Adolf Egger, Director of the Fiat Factory in Vienna; Major Paul Höger; Colonel Karl Bardolff; Dr. Ferdinand Fischer.
In the sixth car: Baron Andreas von Morsey; Captain Pilz; other members of Franz Ferdinand's staff and Bosnian officials.
In the seventh car: Major Erich Ritter von Hüttenbrenner; Count Josef von Erbach-Fürstenau; Lieutenant Robert Grein.

At 10:15 the parade passed the first member of the group, Mehmed Mehmedbašić, who had placed himself in an upstairs window, but later claimed that he could not get a clear shot and decided to hold fire so as not to jeopardize the mission by alerting the authorities. The second member, Nedeljko Čabrinović, threw a bomb (or a stick of dynamite, according to some reports) at Franz Ferdinand's car, but missed. The explosion destroyed the following car, severely wounding the passengers, a policeman and several members of the crowd. Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide pill and jumped into the shallow river Miljacka. The procession sped away towards the Town Hall, and the scene turned to chaos. Police dragged Čabrinović out of the river, and he was severely beaten by the crowd before being taken into custody. His cyanide pill was either old or of too weak a dosage and had not worked. The river was also only 4 inches deep and failed to drown him. Some of the other assassins left, either assuming that Franz Ferdinand had been killed or losing their nerve.

Arriving at the Town Hall for a scheduled reception, Franz Ferdinand showed understandable signs of stress, interrupting a prepared speech of welcome by Mayor Curcic to protest "we come here and people throw bombs at us". He then became calm and the remainder of the reception passed tensely but without incident. Officials and members of the Archduke's party discussed how to guard against another assassination attempt without coming to any coherent conclusion. A suggestion that the troops outside the city be brought in to line the streets was reportedly rejected because they did not have their parade uniforms with them on manoeuvres. Security was accordingly left to the small Sarajevo police force. The only obvious measure taken was for one of Franz Ferdinand's military aides to take up a protective position on the left hand running board of his car. This is confirmed by photographs of the scene outside the Town Hall.

The remaining conspirators had been obstructed by the heavy crowds, and it appeared that the assassination plan had failed. However, after the reception at the Town Hall, Franz Ferdinand decided to go to the hospital and visit the wounded victims of Čabrinović's bomb. Meanwhile, Gavrilo Princip had gone to a nearby food shop, either having given up or assuming that the bomb attack had been successful. Emerging, he saw Franz Ferdinand's open car reversing after having taken a wrong turn as it drove past, near the Latin Bridge. The driver, Franz Urban, had not been advised of the hospital change in plan and had continued on a route that would take the Archduke and his party directly out of the city. Pushing forward to the right hand side of the car, Gavrilo Princip twice fired a Belgian made Fabrique Nationale M 1910 semi-automatic pistol in 7.65×17 mm (.32 ACP) caliber (serial number 19074). The first bullet went through the side of the vehicle and hit Sophie in the abdomen, and the second hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck. Princip later claimed that his intention was to kill Governor General Potiorek and not Sophie.

Both victims remained seated upright, but dying while being driven to the Governor's residence for medical treatment. Franz Ferdinand's last words, moments after being shot, were reported by von Harrach as „Sophie dear, don't die! Stay alive for our children!“ („Sopherl! Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben für unsere Kinder!“)

Princip tried to kill himself, first by ingesting the cyanide, and then with his gun, but he vomited the apparently ineffective poison, and the gun was wrestled from his hand by onlookers before he had a chance to fire another shot.

Anti-Serb rioting broke out in Sarajevo in the hours following the assassination until order was restored by the military.

Consequences

During interrogation, Princip, Čabrinović and the other members of their group remained silent until Danilo Ilić blurted out details of the conspiracy, including that the guns had been supplied from Serbian military stocks.

The killing of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire produced widespread shock across Europe and there was initially much sympathy for the Austrian position. The Government in Vienna saw this as an opportunity to settle the perceived threat from Serbia once and for all. After ascertaining that they could count on support from Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary blamed the government of Serbia for the assassination and issued a harsh set of demands, which was known as the July Ultimatum. Austria-Hungary insisted that Serbia had to accept all of the conditions which included provisions that would have impacted on Serbian sovereignty. Caught between the external threat and their own extremist groups the Serbian Government accepted all the demands made except that Austrian investigators be permitted to undertake enquiries into the assassination on Serbian soil. Austria-Hungary then declared war on July 28, 1914. The system of interlocking alliances and treaties then in force led the great powers of Europe into World War I after a month of diplomatic maneuvering.

Those of the conspirators who were underage were sentenced to prison rather than execution. Three, including Danilo Ilić, were hanged. Čabrinović and Princip died of tuberculosis in prison.

It could be argued that this assassination set in train most of the major events of the 20th century, with its reverberations lingering into the 21st. The Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War is generally linked to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. It also led to the success of the Russian Revolution, which helped lead to the Cold war. This, in turn, led to many of the major political developments of the twentieth century, such as the fall of the colonial empires and the rise of the United States and Soviet Russia to super-power status.

However, if the assassination had not occurred, it is probable that World War I would have still have erupted, triggered by another event at another time. The alliances noted above and the existence of vast and complex mobilisation plans that were almost impossible to reverse once put in motion made war on a huge scale increasingly likely from the beginning of the twentieth century.

Relics

The bullet fired by Gavrilo Princip, sometimes referred to as "the bullet that started World War I", is stored as a museum exhibit in the Konopiště Castle near the town of Benešov, Czech Republic.

Princip's weapon itself, along with the large car that the Archduke was riding in, his bloodstained light blue uniform and plumed cocked hat, and the chaise longue on which he was placed while being attended to by physicians, are kept as a permanent exhibit in the Museum of Military History, Vienna, Austria.

References

Ponting, Clive. Thirteen Days, Chatto & Windus, London, 2002.