Assassination in Sarajevo
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Image:Sarajevo11.jpg On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg were killed in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Bosnian nationalist group the Young Bosnia. The event, known as the Assassination in Sarajevo, was one of the Causes of World War I.
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Background
Image:Gavrilloprincip.jpg Bosnia and Herzegovina had been occupied by Austria-Hungary in 1878 and annexed in 1908. Many Bosnians, particularly Bosnian Serbs, resented the occupation, preferring instead unification with Serbia.
In late June 1914 Franz Ferdinand visited Bosnia in order to observe some military maneuvres and to open a museum in Sarajevo. Normally he was not accompanied on trips 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 of various nationalities, were equipped with Fabrique Nationale de Herstal model 1910 pistols and bombs supplied by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret society with links to Serbian government.
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 so inexperienced that the Black Handers never really believed the attempt would be successful. Most people do agree that the Black Hand supplied the weapons and cyanide to the assassins.
Direct links between the Serbian government and the terrorists action have never been proven. There is in fact evidence that the Serbian government tried in good faith to prevent terrorist infiltration of Bosnia, as they were attempting to avoid provoking the Austro-Hungarian government in the aftermath of the successful Balkan wars. Another theory postulates the involvement of the Okhrana with the Black Hand.
The assassination
Image:Sarajevo Attentat.jpg Image:Assassination of Franz Ferdinand.jpg Image:Princip arrested.jpg
Note: The exact course of events was never firmly established, mostly due to inconsistent stories of witnesses.
The seven conspirators were inexperienced with weapons, and it was only due to an extraordinary set of coincidences that they were successful. Around 10:00 Ferdinand and his comitive left the Philipovic army camp, where he had performed a brief review of the troops. The motorcade consisted of seven cars:
- In the first car: the chief detective 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 attempted to shoot from an upstairs window, but couldn't 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 River Miljacka. The procession sped away towards the Town Hall, and the crowd turned into 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 upon hearing the explosion, under the assumption that Franz Ferdinand had been killed.
The remaining conspirators didn't get an opportunity to attack because of the heavy crowds, and it was beginning to look like the assassination would fail. However, after the reception at Town Hall, Franz Ferdinand decided to go to the hospital and visit the victims of Čabrinović's bomb. Meanwhile, Gavrilo Princip had gone to a nearby shop for a cheese sandwich, either having given up or wrongly assuming that the Archduke had died in the explosion, when he spotted Franz Ferdinand's car as it drove past near the Latin Bridge, having taken a wrong turn. After dashing up to the car, Princip fired twice: the first round went through the side of the car and hit Sophie in the abdomen, and the second hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck. They were driven to the governor's residence where they died from their wounds. His very last words were,"Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don't die! Stay alive for our children!"
Princip tried to kill himself first by ingesting the cyanide, and then with his gun, but he vomited the poison (which Čabrinović had also done, leading the police to believe the group had been deceived and sold a much weaker poison), and the gun was wrestled from his hand by a mob of onlookers before he had a chance to fire another shot.
Consequences
During interrogation, Princip, Čabrinović and all the others maintained their vow of silence. The authorities thought the imprisonment would be arbitrary, until one member, Danilo Ilić, lost his patience and told the authorities everything, including the fact that the guns were supplied by the Serb government.
Austria-Hungary blamed the government of Serbia for the assassination and issued an unrealistic ultimatum, which was known as the July Ultimatum. Austria-Hungary insisted that Serbia had to accept all of the conditions. To the surprise of most of Europe, Serbia accepted all of the ultimatum except one point. Austria-Hungary then decided that Serbia had failed to accept the ultimatum, and declared war on July 28, 1914. It was the immediate cause of World War I. The assassination, however, is usually considered more of a pretext to the war than an actual cause.
As all of the conspirators were under age, they were sentenced to prison rather than execution (except for the older Danilo Ilić, who was 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 linked often to causing 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 decisions of the century, such as the fall of the British Empire and so on. However, if the assassination had not happened, it is likely that World War I and the abovementioned consequences of it would have still happened. This is widely seen in, for example, the German war plans from as early as the December 1912 Potsdam war council, in which Tirpitz asked to delay a possible war at least 18 months, until summer 1914, so that the Kiel canal and the German U-boat programmes could be finished.
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 car that the Archduke was riding in, his bloodstained uniform, 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.de:Attentat von Sarajevo
ko:사라예보 사건 fr:Assassinat de Sarajevo lb:Attentat vu Sarajevo nl:Moord op Frans Ferdinand van Oostenrijk ja:サラエボ事件 pl:Zamach w Sarajewie sr:Сарајевски атентат sv:Skotten i Sarajevo zh:萨拉热窝事件