THE ASSASSINATION
Franz Ferdinand, Heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Sophie
Hundred years ago a tubercular young
man, standing at the junction of two streets in Sarajevo, fired two shots at a
couple in a car. The woman died on the spot while the man died a few minutes
later.
The killer was an impoverished
Bosinian Serb named Gavro Princip. The couple he killed was Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian imperial throne, and his wife,
Sophie.
The shooting would catapult Europe
into a destructive (and largely pointless) war and millions would be
slaughtered, a consequence Princip probably was not aiming for when he, almost
randomly, took up a position in front of a Jewish general store and
delicatessen, at the junction of Franz Joseph Street (ironically enough, named
after the uncle of the Archduke and the reigning emperor of the
Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Joseph) and Appel Quay, on the morning of 28
June 1914.
The Archduke had survived another
assassination attempt that morning. A man had tried to kill the Archduke by
throwing a bomb at his car. The man’s name was Nedjo Cabrinovic. Cabrinovic was
a friend of Princip. The bomb he threw at the Archduke’s car was handed to him
by Princip, along with a cyanide capsule. This was the agreement among the
conspirators: to commit suicide after the killing. Dead conspirators do not
talk (and betray their colleagues).
Before he threw the bomb that he
thought would ensure his place in history, Nedjo wanted to have his photograph
taken that morning—‘so that,’ (he would say in his trial) ‘something would
remain of me.’ With a friend, whom he ran into by chance, Nedjo went to an open
photographic studio. There, he posed for a photograph.
Nedjo Cabrinovic
The last photograph taken of Nedjo
Cabrinovic as a free man shows a tall, handsome man sitting on a low arm-chair
and staring intensely at the camera. He is sporting a moustache that makes him
look somewhat older than his 19 years. He is wearing a jacket, a coat and tie.
His legs are crossed and in his right hand he is holding a rolled newspaper.
His lips are pursed and he looks tense.
It was nine o’clock in the morning of
28 June 1914 when Nedjo posed for his photograph. He reckoned that the royal
couple would be dead by eleven. The photographer developed print copies within
an hour: Nedjo ordered six. Lying to his friend that he was leaving for Zagreb,
Nedjo requested him to send a copy each to his grandmother, his sisters, and a
few friends he had in Belgrade.
Nedjo then went to the Appel Quay and
spent some time strolling, thinking in his mind where he would stand when he
threw the bomb. His aim, as he would later assert in his trial, was to kill
only the Archduke and no one else. (He was challenged about this in the trial and
it was pointed out that when he threw the bomb at the car it was inevitable
that the Archduke’s wife would die too. Nedjo replied that he wanted to kill
only the Archduke, but, if that was not possible, his wife would need to be
‘sacrificed’ too—in the name of revolution.)
A number of witnesses would claim in
the trial that they had seen Nedjo —a tall dark man wearing a black
hat—standing by the electric pole, riverwards, on the Appel Quay when the
Archduke’s parade passed. Archduke and Archduchess were in the third car of the
cavalcade.
Nedjo had unscrewed the bomb and kept
it in his belt, his hand covering it. As he saw the ‘green cap’ in the third
car, Nedjo hit the bomb against the lamp pole to activate it, and threw it at
the car.
What probably saved the Archduke on
that occasion were Nedjo’s hurry and the instinctive reaction of the royal
chauffer when the chauffer heard the sound of the bomb being hit against the
lamp pole.
Nedjo did not follow the instructions
given to him to the letter. He was asked to count to ten slowly and then throw
the bomb, but in his excitement, he threw it without waiting. As a result the
bomb still had almost twelve seconds to go before it exploded.
In the meanwhile the chauffer had
instinctively accelerated when he heard the sound of Nedjo priming the bomb. As
a result the bomb landed on the folded roof of Archduke’s automobile (rather
than on Archduke’s person), bounced off it, and fell on the ground.
According to one eye-witness Ferdinand
stood up in his car, looking ‘jittery and shaken’. According to Nedjo himself,
the Archduke looked at him with ‘cold, inflexible gaze’.
Nedjo turned around, swallowed the
poison—in his trial he said he took a double dose—and jumped over the wall into
the river Miljacka. The poison did not work. The river was at a low tide and Nedjo
lay sprawled and face down on the river bank. A Gendarme who had seen Nedjo
throwing the bomb chased him down to the river A Muslim detective and two local
men also stumbled down to the riverbank. Nedjo was dragged out of river.
(During his trial Nedjo was visibly irked to hear the witnesses tell the
presiding judge that they too had jumped into the river after him. He made it a
point to clarify that none of them had jumped into the river—probably
indicating that they lacked the courage—rather they had followed a side-road
from Appel Quay to reach the river bank). The detective pulled out a revolver
and wanted to shoot Nedjo there and then, but he was prevented by the gendarme.
One of the men asked Nedjo, ‘You are a Serb, aren’t you?’ Nedjo replied, ‘I am
a heroic Serb.’
Miljacka River and Appel Quey to its Left: the Site of the assassination Attempt by Cabrinovic
Nedjo was taken to the police station.
At the police station he told the police that he had got the bomb from his
‘association’. He was asked whether he had accomplices; he did not answer.
Sitting in Archduke and Archduchess’s
car were General Oskar Potiorek, the governor of the increasingly unpopular
Austro-Hungarian Empire in Bosnia, and Count Harrach, who owned the car.
Potiorek was sitting in the back with the royal couple while Harrach was
sitting in front with the driver. The two would be with the royal couple later
that same morning when Gavro Princip fired his fatal shots.
After the failed assassination
attempt, the Archduke told General Potiorek that he believed that two bombs were thrown at him; he also
thought that one of the bombs landed inside the car, although he did not see
where it exactly landed. However, he said nothing because he did not want to
alarm his wife (!), and carried on sitting in the car (presumably waiting to be
blown up.)
As it happened, the bomb did not land
in the car. The Archduke had survived the first attempt to assassinate him. But
he would not live for long. In fact he would be dead within hours.
Archduke’s car went a few yards in
front on Appel Quay after the bomb was hurled at him before it came to a halt
at Ferdinand’s orders. Ferdinand asked Count Harrach to go back and see whether
anyone was injured (twenty people sustained injuries). As Harrach carried out
his inquiries, Ferdinand and Sophie waited in the open-topped car in the middle
of the road where a bomb was thrown at him minutes earlier. The Archduke
remarked to general Potiorek, ‘the fellow [Nedjo] must be insane.’
As Nedjo had hinted at, following his
arrest, at the police station, he was not operating in isolation. He was part
of a conspiracy to assassinate Franz Ferdinand.
As the Archduke’s cavalcade drove
along the Appel Quay on that sunny June morning in Sarajevo, a total of five
assassins were lying in wait for him. They were all part of the same plot, but
only one of them was aware of the identities of all of them. That man was Gavro
Princip, who eventually killed Ferdinand later that morning.
Gavro Princip, with his childhood
friend Danilo Ilic, hatched a plot to assassinate the Heir-Apparent to the
Austro-Hungarian throne, and the two recruited others.
The first assassin waiting for the
Heir-Apparent was a Bosnian Muslim named Mehmed Mehmedbasic. Mehmedbasic was
recruited to the plot a few weeks before 28 June. Although belonging to the
Muslim Community traditionally loyal to the Empire, Mehmedbasic had spent the
previous years associating with revolutionaries, majority of them Bosnian
Serbs, who kept themselves busy, plotting the overthrow of the Empire.
As Franz Ferdinand’s car drove on
Appel Quay, Mehmedbasic was waiting, with a bomb and a revolver; but he did
nothing.
The second assassin waiting for the
Archduke was a 17 year old boy named Vaso Cubrilovic. Vaso was standing more or
less exactly opposite Nedjo Cabrinovic, armed, like Mehmedbasic, with a
revolver and bomb; and, like Mehmedbasic, Vaso failed to act.
Vaso was recruited to the plot 6 weeks
before the assassination.
Neither Vaso nor Mehmedbasic was aware
of the identities of the other assassins, including Gavro Princip.
Years later, both Mehmedbasic and Vaso
Cubrilovic (the only two of the plotters who lived to tell their tales) would
give imaginative excuses why they made no attempt on the Archduke’s life. The
real reason most probably was that their nerves failed them at the last minute.
The third assassin was Nedjo
Cabrinovic, the most uninhibited and flamboyant of the lot. He only had bombs
on him, as he had not learned to shoot. Nedjo, itching to write his name in the
history, threw the bomb, but missed.
As Nedjo’s bomb went off the remaining
assassins present on the quay threw themselves on the road. We already know
Mehmed Mehmedbasic and Vaso Cubrilovic. There were three more.
Just round the corner from Vaso
Cubrilovic and Nedjo was standing Cvetjko Popovic. Only 16, Popovic was the
youngest of the assassins. Popovic (and probably Vaso too) must have seen that
Cabrinovic’s bomb had failed to kill Ferdinand. However, Popovic failed to act
even as Ferdinand, who seemed to have no concerns for his safety, waited in the
open-topped car (with his wife next to him) in the middle of Appel Quay for
several minutes. Popovic did not act.
The two remaining assassins were
Trifko Grabez and the eventual killer, Gavro Princip. Both of them were
standing further down Appel Quay— Princip near the Latin Bridge (which, years
later, would be renamed Princip Bridge) and Grabez near the Imperial Bridge.
Both Princip and Grabez were standing some distance from Nedjo and probably not
in a position to determine whether his bomb had done the job.
To summarise: of the five assassins
waiting to kill the Heir-Apparent, only one acted. And he was unsuccessful. The
remaining four did not act for one reason or another. Incredibly, the Archduke
had survived. Surely he would not test his luck and go out again on the roads
of Sarajevo where who knows how many more assassins were waiting to kill him.
Ferdinand and Sophie in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914
The Archduke’s cavalcade continued to
the town hall. The first two cars, which had not waited after the explosion
reached the hall well before the Archduke’s car arrived. A welcoming party of
Muslims, Catholics and Serbs who were loyal to the Empire was waiting at the
town hall. A red carpet had been rolled out.
The Archduke was incandescent with
rage by the time he arrived at the town hall. As the Lord Mayor (who at the
time was unaware of the assassination attempt on Ferdinand’s life—the party had
heard the explosion but thought it was a cannon salute) began his welcoming
speech, the Archduke interrupted him, saying, ‘What is the good of your
speeches? I come to Sarajevo on a friendly visit and someone throws a bomb at
me. This is outrageous.’ (This suggests that the Archduke’s grasp of the
political situation in Bosnia-Hercegovina, which the Empire had annexed only
three years earlier, was as shaky as his assessment of the danger posed to his
life on the streets of Sarajevo, as his subsequent actions would show.) The
Archduchess whispered soothing words into her husband’s ears and he calmed down
visibly.
The Archduke spoke after the mayor’s
speech and added a line about the assassination attempt into his prepared text.
During the reception Archduke regained his poise sufficiently to joke about the
attempt. ‘You mark my word,’ he said, ‘the chap will probably, in good old
Austrian style, be decorated with the Order of Merit, instead of being made
harmless.’ He added after a pause: ‘Today we shall get a few more little
bullets.’ Prophetic words.
Even though Ferdinand was determinedly
making light of the situation a furious discussion ensued among the officers
about how to get him out of Sarajevo alive. General Potiork opined that the
order of the day should be changed and the Archduke should go straight to Konak
(the official residence of the governor) by a different route, where he was due
for lunch. The Archduke rejected the suggestion that he stay at the town hall
while the troops cleared the roads. He insisted on going to the hospital to see
a member of the procession who was injured in the explosion.
It was eventually agreed that Archduke
would continue with the parade in his open top car! However, the cavalcade, instead
of turning right into the Franz Joseph Street, as originally planned, which
would have taken them through the narrow roads of the city centre, would go
instead straight back on the Appel Quay, taking the long way round to the
hospital.
Archduke sent a telegram to his uncle
Franz Joseph, the Emperor (there was little love lost between the two men),
informing him of the attempt on his life. He then sent his aide to the first
floor of the town hall where the Archduchess was meeting the Muslim women of the
city, with the message that he wanted her to go separately to Konak (and to
safety). The Archduchess told the aide in a manner, he recalled later, that
brooked no argument that as long as her husband appeared in public that day she
was not leaving him.
Franz Ferdinand & Sophie posing for a Photograph Outside Town hall
The Archduke was now ready to leave
for what would turn out to be the final journey of his life. The last
photograph taken of the royal couple shows them sitting side by side in the
back of the car.
This time round Franz Ferdinand sat in
the middle. To his right was sitting his wife, Sophie; to his left, the
despised general of Bosnia and Hercegovina, Oskar Potiorek.
Count Harrach, the owner of the car,
was convinced that there would be another attempt on the Archduke’s life. He
refused to sit next to the driver; instead he decided to stand on the sideboard
of the car in order to shield the Archduke from further attack.
Harrach’s hunch was correct. There
would be another attempt on Archduke’s life. Waiting for him at the junction of
Appel Quay and Franz Joseph Street would be an assassin carrying a pistol and a
bomb.
The cavalcade set off once more. At
the Emperor’s bridge was standing Trifko Grabez; but Archduke avoided him, as
the parade did not turn left on to the bridge and went straight ahead, instead,
on the Appel Quay. Even then Grabez, who must have been in a position to see
the Archduke in his open top car could have made an attempt on Archduke’s life
if he wanted. He didn’t. (In his trial Grabez would tie himself in knots and
change his story more than once as to what his intentions were on that day.)
Still on Appel Quay, the cavalcade
approached another bridge, the Latin bridge. Just before the Latin Bridge, on
the right, was Franz Joseph Street. The cars were not supposed to turn into
Franz Joseph Street; they should have continued on Appel Quay. Inexplicably,
the car in front of the royal car turned right into the Franz Joseph Street,
and the chauffer of Archduke Ferdinand’s car also followed the car into Franz
Joseph Street, instead of going straight ahead.
It is not known why this mistake
happened. One (plausible) explanation is that the drivers were not properly
briefed in the confusion after Nedjo’s bomb went off, and they mistakenly kept
to the original route. The other explanation would be: this was a conspiracy
and the royal couple was deliberately delivered into the hands of the assassin.
To the right, where the car, having
turned into the Franz Joseph Street, would now have to pass, was a general
store and delicatessen of a Jewish retailer Moritz Schiller. Standing in front
of the shop was a hollow-eyed short man (according to a nearby witness) with a
browning pistol in his hand: Gavro Princip.
In his trial Princip said that when he
heard the bomb explosion he was sure it was by one the ‘associates’, but he
wasn’t sure which one. He began running with the mob, and then saw the
Archduke’s open-top car standing in the middle of Appel Quay. He assumed that
it was all over and that Ferdinand was dead. He saw Nedjo Cabrinovic being arrested.
He thought about rushing to him and shooting him dead, and then shooting
himself. Then the cars began to move again. It was then that Princip realised,
even though he had not seen him, that Franz Ferdinand was still alive.
Princip returned to the Latin bridge
wondering where he was going to take his position. He knew the published route
of Ferdinand’s procession and knew that it would pass through the Franz Joseph
Street. He decided to cross the road and wait in front of Schiller’s grocery
shop.
As Archduke’s car turned into Franz
Joseph Street, General Potiorek, who was sitting on the other side of the
Archduke, realised that the royal chauffer had made a mistake. Potiorek shouted
at the chauffer, ‘What is this? Stop! You are going the wrong way! We ought to
go via the Appel Quay!’
The driver pulled up the car and
prepared to reverse back on to the apple quay. The car stopped directly in
front of Gavro Princip.
This was the place, this was the
moment, and Princip was the man.
Princip pulled out his pistol from his
pocket and raised it. He was not an experienced shooter, having taken lessons
for the first time only a couple of months earlier. He turned his head away,
which meant that he was not even looking at his victims, and fired. Then he
fired again. He fired only two shots. That was enough.
As General Potiorek still issued
instructions and the car began to reverse, the Duchess fell forward and to her
left, across Ferdinand’s lap, almost touching Potiorek. Potiorek also noticed a
thin stream of blood coming out of the Archduke’s mouth. He saw the Archduke’s
lips moving and realised that he was saying something to his wife, but could
not hear the words. Potiorek thought that the Duchess had fainted.
Count Harrach, who was standing on the
sideboard of the car, also saw blood oozing out of Archduke’s mouth. He heard
the Duchess saying, ‘In God’s name what has happened to you?’ Then the Duchess
collapsed, her face in Archduke’s lap. The Archduke called out, ‘Sopher! Don’t
die. Live for our children!’
Count Harrach saw the Archduke holding
his right side. He grabbed the collar of Archduke’s tunic to stop him from
slumping forward and asked him, ‘Is something hurting you?’ The Archduke, his
face distorted, whispered, ‘That’s nothing.’ He repeated, his voice fading
rapidly, ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing.’ He repeated this 6 or 7
times and then choked convulsively on the blood in his mouth.
It is not known whether the bullet
that struck Ferdinand was the first or the second shot Princip fired. The
bullet entered the Archduke’s neck through the right hand side of his
coat-collar and severed the jugular vein. It then travelled further and lodged
itself in the Archduke’s spine. The bullet that killed his wife went directly
through the side of the car where she was sitting and hit her in almost
straight line. The entry wound was in the right groin, four centimetres above
the hip bone. The opening wound was six centimetres wide.
The car drove quickly across the
bridge to Konak, the Archduke seeping blood at an alarming rate. Some doctors
ran alongside the car and tried to administer treatment. The Duchess was
unconscious, most probably dead. The Archduke collapsed as the car arrived at
Konak. Both were taken into the building. The duchess was placed on a bed on
the first floor, while the Archduke was placed on a chaise-longue.
By 11.30 in the morning (of 28 June
1914) deaths were confirmed. (Nedjo Cabrinovic’s estimation was exactly right).
The Heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lay dead, and the distant drums of the
First World War began to sound.
