Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand[a] was one of the key events that led to World War I. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated on 28 June 1914 by Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip. They were shot at close range while being driven through Sarajevo, the provincial capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, formally annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908.
Date
28 June 1914
Near the Latin Bridge, Sarajevo, in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie
20 years
Princip was part of a group of six Bosnian assassins together with Muhamed Mehmedbašić, Vaso Čubrilović, Nedeljko Čabrinović, Cvjetko Popović and Trifko Grabež coordinated by Danilo Ilić; all but one were Bosnian Serbs and members of a student revolutionary group that later became known as Young Bosnia. The political objective of the assassination was to free Bosnia and Herzegovina of Austria-Hungarian rule and establish a common South Slav ("Yugoslav") state. The assassination precipitated the July Crisis which led to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia and the start of World War I.
The assassination team was helped by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret nationalist group; support came from Dragutin Dimitrijević, chief of the military intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, as well as from Major Vojislav Tankosić and Rade Malobabić, a Serbian intelligence agent. Tankosić provided bombs and pistols to the assassins and trained them in their use. The assassins were given access to the same clandestine network of safe-houses and agents that Malobabić used for the infiltration of weapons and operatives into Austria-Hungary.
The assassins and key members of the clandestine network were tried in Sarajevo in October 1914. In total twenty-five people were indicted. All six assassins, except Mehmedbašić, were under twenty at the time of the assassination; while the group was dominated by Bosnian Serbs, four of the indictees were Bosnian Croats, and all of them were Austro-Hungarian citizens, none from Serbia. Princip was found guilty of murder and high treason; too young to be executed, he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, while the four other attackers also received jail terms. Five of the older prisoners were sentenced to be hanged.
Black Hand members were arrested and tried before a Serbian court in Salonika in 1917 on fabricated charges of high treason; the Black Hand was disbanded and three of its leaders were executed. Much of what is known about the assassinations comes from these two trials and related records. Princip's legacy was re-evaluated following the breakup of Yugoslavia, and public opinion of him in the successor states is largely divided along ethnic lines.
Preliminaries
Previous conspiracy
Danilo Ilić was a Bosnian Serb. He had worked as a schoolteacher and as a bank worker but in 1913 and 1914 he lived with, and outwardly off, his mother, who operated a small boarding house in Sarajevo. Ilić was a member of a secret revolutionary society or Kružok organized on the model of the Black Hand. According to Serbian Colonel C. A. Popović, a captain at the time and a member of the Black Hand, in late 1913, Danilo Ilić came to the Serbian listening post at Užice to speak to him. Popović claimed that Ilić recommended an end to the period of revolutionary organization building and a move to direct action against Austria-Hungary. Popović alleged that he sent Danilo Ilić to Belgrade to discuss this matter with Chief of Serbian Military Intelligence Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, known more commonly as Apis.[34] By 1913, Apis and his fellow military conspirators (drawn heavily from the ranks of the May 1903 coup) had come to dominate what was left of the Black Hand.[35]
There are no reports as to what took place between Ilić and Apis during the alleged meeting, but soon Apis's righthand man and fellow Black Hander, Serbian Major Vojislav Tankosić, who by this time was in charge of guerrilla training, called a Serbian irredentist planning meeting in Toulouse, France.[36] Amongst those summoned to the Toulouse meeting was Muhamed Mehmedbašić, a Bosniak carpenter from Herzegovina.[37] According to Luigi Albertini writing in 1942, Mehmedbašić was a member of the Black Hand, having been sworn into the organization by Black Hand Provincial Director for Bosnia-Herzegovina Vladimir Gacinović and Danilo Ilić. Mehmedbašić was (here quoting Albertini paraphrasing Mehmedbašić) "eager to carry out an act of terrorism to revive the revolutionary spirit of Bosnia."[38] During this January 1914 meeting, various possible Austro-Hungarian targets for assassination were discussed, including Franz Ferdinand. However, the participants decided only to dispatch Mehmed Mehmedbašić to Sarajevo, to kill the Governor of Bosnia, Oskar Potiorek.[38]
According to Mehmedbašić while he was traveling to Bosnia-Herzegovina from France, police searched his train for a thief. Thinking the police might be after him, he threw his weapons (a dagger and a bottle of poison) in the lavatory.[38] Once he arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina he wrote to Gacinović and did nothing more until Ilić wrote to him to summon him to Mostar. On 26 March 1914,[39] Ilić informed Mehmedbašić that Belgrade (meaning the Black Hand) thought that an attack of Franz Ferdinand instead of the Potiorek would be far more important and that they would support it.[40] (Apis later boasted to the Serbian Court that he ordered the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in his position as head of the Intelligence Department,[41] however Apis made the unproven claims in 1917 attempting to save his own life since he was about to be executed for high treason.[42])
Controversy about responsibility
Serbia's "warning" to Austria-Hungary
Following the assassinations, Serbian Ambassador to France Milenko Vesnić and Serbian Ambassador to Russia Miroslav Spalajković put out statements claiming that Serbia had warned Austria-Hungary of the impending assassination.[139] Serbia soon thereafter denied making warnings and denied knowledge of the plot. Prime Minister Pašić himself made these denials to Az Est on 7 July and to the Paris edition of the New York Herald on 20 July.[140] Other voices eventually spoke out on the "warning". As Serbian Education Minister Ljubomir Jovanović wrote in Krv Sloventsva, in late May or early June, Prime Minister Pašić reviewed the plot of the impending assassination with members of his cabinet.[141] On 18 June, a telegram, lacking in specifics, ordered Serbia's Ambassador to Vienna, Jovan Jovanović Pižon, to warn Austria-Hungary that Serbia had reason to believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia.[142] On 21 June, Ambassador Jovanović met with Austro-Hungarian Finance Minister Leon Biliński. According to Serbian Military Attaché to Vienna, Colonel Lešjanin, Ambassador Jovanović, spoke to Biliński and "...stressed in general terms the risks the Archduke heir apparent [sic] might run from the inflamed public opinion in Bosnia and Serbia. Some serious personal misadventure might befall him. His journey might give rise to incidents and demonstrations that Serbia would deprecate but that would have fatal repercussions on Austro-Serbian relations."[143] Jovanović came back from the meeting with Biliński and told Lešjanin that "...Biliński showed no sign of attaching great importance to the total message and dismissed it limiting himself to remarking when saying goodbye and thanking him: 'Let us hope nothing does happen.'"[144] The Austro-Hungarian Finance Minister took no action based on Jovanović's remarks.
In 1924, J. Jovanović went public stating that his warning had been made on his own initiative, and what he said was that "Among the Serb youths (in the army) there may be one who will put a ball-cartridge in his rifle or revolver in place of a blank cartridge and he may fire it, the bullet might strike the man giving provocation (Franz Ferdinand)."[145] J. Jovanović's account changed back and forth over the years and never adequately addressed Colonel Lešjanin's statement.[146] Biliński did not speak openly on the subject, but his press department chief confirmed that a meeting had taken place including a vague warning, but there was no mention of an ethnic Serb Austro-Hungarian soldier shooting Franz Ferdinand.[145]
In the days leading up to the assassination, Pašić was the caretaker prime minister because during this period the Serbian Government briefly fell to a political alliance led by the Serbian Military. The military favored promoting Jovan Jovanović to Foreign Minister,[147] and Jovanović's loyalties one might expect to have been divided and his orders therefore carried out poorly. By choosing a military loyalist to convey the message, and by not including any of the specifics such as the conspirators' names and weapons, Pašić, a survivor, hedged his bets against the various possible outcomes and consequences of the impending assassination.[148]
Rade Malobabić
In 1914, Rade Malobabić was Serbian Military Intelligence's chief undercover operative against Austria-Hungary. His name appeared in Serbian documents captured by Austria-Hungary during the war. These documents describe the running of arms, munitions, and agents from Serbia into Austria-Hungary under Malobabić's direction.[61]
Owing to the suppression by Serbia of Apis's confession and of the Salonika trial transcripts historians did not initially link Malobabić closely to the Sarajevo attack. Apis's confession, however, states that "I engaged Malobabić to organize the assassination on the occasion of the announced arrival of Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo."[41] At the Salonika trial, Colonel Ljubomir Vulović (head of the Serbian Frontiers Service) testified: 'In 1914 on occasion of my official trip from Loznica to Belgrade, I received a letter at the General Staff [signed by Marshal Radomir Putnik, Serbia's top military officer] noting that agents of Malobabić would come and a teacher whose name I don't recall (Danilo Ilić was a teacher but it is unclear if the teacher in question was Ilić as Ilić can be placed in Brod but not Loznica) so I could sent [sic] them into Bosnia.' Because of that 'I went to Loznica and either that day or very soon afterwards sent Rade and that teacher into Bosnia.' Soon thereafter occurred the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand."[149] On the eve of his execution, Malobabić told a priest: "They ordered me to go to Sarajevo when that assassination was to take place, and when everything was over, they ordered me to come back and fulfill other missions, and then there was the outbreak of the war."[150][151] Vladimir Dedijer in The Road to Sarajevo presented additional testimonial evidence that Malobabić arrived in Sarajevo on the eve of the Sarajevo attack and gave the final go-ahead for the operation to Danilo Ilić.[152] This meshes with Dedijer's theory that Djuro Ŝarac had given instructions to Ilić on 16 June canceling the assassination. Soon after their confessions, Serbia executed Malobabić, Vulović, and Apis on false charges. Serbia published no clarifications of their confessions with regards to the Sarajevo attack.