Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand

The Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria, with his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, was paying a visit of state to Bosnia, then a subject province of Austria, peopled by Slavs. After viewing the maneuvers of two army corps at their field quarters, he expressed a desire to inspect the troops in the capital at Sarajevo. He arrived in the capital early on the morning of Sunday, June 28, 1914, to find only the local governor and his staff waiting to receive him. The sheets were thronged, for the day was a Serbian fete. While the party was motoring leisurely toward the place of inspection, a black package fell upon the opened hood of the archduke's car. He tossed it into the street, where it exploded, wounding two officials in a motor car and six spectators in the street. The bomb-thrower, a young printer by the name of Cabrinovitch, a native of Herzegovina, was seized, and confessed at his trial that he had received the bomb from the Serbian arsenal at Kragujevatz.

Arrived at the Town Hall, the Archduke protested against the lack of precautions taken to insure his safety, but when the civic officials sought to dissuade him from continuing his tour of the city, he refused and insisted upon driving to the hospital where one of the wounded aides-de-camp was receiving treatment. As his car was proceeding through a narrow street, the Appel Quay, a bomb was thrown which failed to explode. The assassin, a Bosnian student called Prinzip, and like Cabrinovitch a Protestant Serb, then approached the car and fired three shots from a Browning pistol. The Archduke was mortally wounded in the neck, and the Duchess was terribly wounded in the abdomen, she having offered her body as a shield to save her husband. Both died within an hour. The Austrian governor of Sarajevo at once laid the blame at Serbia's door. The true authorship of the dastardly crime, however, is yet to be revealed.

The assassination was denounced generally throughout Europe, but no inte...

The road to maneuvers was shaped like the letter V, making a sharp turn at the bridge over the River Nilgacka. Franz Ferdinand's car could go fast enough until it reached this spot but here it was forced to slow down for the turn. Here Princip had taken his stand. As the car came abreast he stepped forward from the curb, drew his automatic pistol from his coat and fired two shots. The first struck the wife of the Archduke, the Archduchess Sofia, in the abdomen. She was an expectant mother. She died instantly.

The second bullet struck the Archduke close to the heart.He uttered only one word; Sofia - a call to his stricken wife. Then his head fell back and he collapsed. He died almost instantly. The officers seized Princip. They beat him over the head with the flat of their swords. They knocked him down; they kicked him, tortured him, and all but killed him. He was then taken to the Sarajevo gaol (jail).

Borijove Jevtic
One of the Conspirators
Sarajevo, 28 June 1914

Telegrams Related to the Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand

On June 28, 1914, M. Dumaine, French Ambassador at Vienna, reported to M. René Viviani, President of the Council and Minister for Foreign Affairs at Paris, the assassination that day of the hereditary Archduke of Austria and his wife at Sarajevo, Bosnia.

On June 29, 1914, Yov. M. Yovanovitch, Serbian Minister at Vienna, telegraphed to M. N. Pashitch, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs at Belgrade, that the Vienna press asserted that magisterial inquiry had already shown that the Sarajevo outrage was prepared at Belgrade; that the whole conspiracy in its wider issues was organized there among youths inspired with the great Serbian idea; and that the Belgrade press was exciting public opinion by articles about the intolerable conditions in Bosnia, papers containing which were being smuggled in large quantities into Bosnia.

On the same day, June 29, 1914, Ritter von Storck, Secretary of the German Legation at Belgrade, the Austro-Hungarian Minister, Baron Giesl von Gieslingen being absent from his post on leave, reported to Count Berchtold, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Vienna, the following facts:

"Yesterday the anniversary of the battle of the Amselfeld was celebrated with greater ceremony than usual, and there were celebrations in honor of the Serbian patriot, Milos Obilic, who in 1389 with two companions treacherously stabbed the victorious Murad.

"Among all Serbians, Obilic is regarded as the national hero. In place of the Turks, however, we are now looked on as the hereditary enemy, thanks to the propaganda which has been nourished under the aegis of the royal Government and the agitation which for many years has been carried on in the press.

"A repetition of the drama on the field of Kossovo seems, therefore, to have hovered before the minds of the three young criminals of Sarajevo, Princip, Cabrinovic, and the third person still unknown, who also threw...