Topic Five - Reading Four
The Assassination at Sarajevo, June 28, 1914
For decades the Balkans had been the powder keg of Europe. On Sunday, June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Francis Ferdinand, and his morganatic wife, Sofia Chotek, were assassinated at Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. The Archduke was on an official visit to preside at army maneuvers when Serbian terrorists seized the opportunity to murder him.
The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was a young Bosnian Serb, nineteen years of age. As a small boy he had tended sheep on the hillsides and had learned from the highland peasants the old Serbian folk tales of Serbia's glorious past. Expelled from the gymnasium at Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, for revolutionary activities, he went to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. For days the young poverty-stricken student slept in the parks and went without food, while he dreamt of leading his people to freedom. On a trip back to Sarajevo in 1913 he joined the "Narodna Odbrana," the secret patriotic society.
One of the leaders of the "Narodna Odbrana," Borijove Jevtic, who was arrested with Princip immediately after the assassination, later gave this firsthand account of the crime.
A tiny clipping from a newspaper, mailed without comment from a secret band of terrorists in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, to their comrades in Belgrade, was the torch which set the world afire with war in 1914. That bit of paper wrecked old, proud empires. It gave birth to new, free nations.
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I was one of the members of the terrorist band in Belgrade which received it.
The little clipping declared that the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand would visit Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, June 28, to direct army maneuvers in the neighboring mountains.
It reached our meeting place, the cafe called "Zeatna Moruna," one night the latter part of April, 1914. To understand how great a sensation that little piece of paper caused among us when it passed from hand to hand almost in silence, and how greatly it inflamed our hearts, it is necessary to explain just why the "Narodna Odbrana" existed, the kind of men that were in it, and the significance of that date, June 28, on which the Archduke dared to enter Sarajevo.
As everyone knows, the old Austrio-Hungarian Empire was built by conquest and intrigues, by sales and treacheries, which held in subjugation many peoples who were neither Austrian nor Hungarian. It taxed them heavily; it diverted the products of their toil to serve the wealth of the master state. It interfered in their old freedom by a multiplicity of laws administered with arrogance.
Several years before the war, a little group of us, thirty-five in all, living in several Bosnian and Hercegovinian cities and villages, formed the "Narodna Odbrana," the secret society, the aim of which was to work for freedom from Austria and a union with Serbia. So strict was the police vigilance in Bosnia and Hercegovina that we set up our headquarters in Belgrade, the capital of our mother country.
The men who were terrorists in 1914 embraced all classes. Most of them were students. Youth is the time for the philosophy of action. There were also teachers, tradesmen and peasants, artisans and even men of the upper classes were ardent patriots. They were dissimilar in everything except hatred of the oppressor.
Such were the men into whose hands the tiny bit of newsprint was sent by friends in Bosnia that April night in Belgrade. At a small table in a very humble cafe, beneath a flickering gas jet we sat and read it. There was no advice nor admonition sent with it. Only four letters and two numerals were sufficient to make us unanimous,
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without discussion, as to what we should do about it. They were contained in the fateful date, June 28.
How dared Francis Ferdinand, not only the representative of the oppressor but in his own person an arrogant tyrant, enter Sarajevo on that day? Such an entry was a studied insult.
June 28 is a date engraved deep in the heart of every Serb, so that the day has a name of its own. It is called the "vidovnan." It is the day on which the old Serbian kingdom was conquered by the Turks at the battle of Amselfelde in 1389. It is also the day on which in the second Balkan War the Serbian armies took glorious revenge on the Turk for his old victory and for the years of enslavement....
As we read that clipping in Belgrade we knew what we would do to Francis Ferdinand. We would kill him to show Austria there yet lived within its borders defiance of its rule. We would kill him to bring once more to the boiling point the fighting spirit of the revolutionaries and pave the way for revolt.
Our decision was taken almost immediately. Death to the tyrant!
Then came the matter of arranging it. To make his death certain twenty-two members of the organization were selected to carry out the sentence. At first we thought we would choose the men by lot. But here Gavrilo Princip intervened.... From the moment Ferdinand's death was decided upon, he took an active leadership in its planning. Upon his advice we left the deed to members of our band, who were in and around Sarajevo, under his direction and that of Gabrinovic, a linotype operator on a Serbian newspaper. Both were regarded as capable of anything in the cause.
Then came the matter of getting them arms. Present at our meeting was Major Tankosic, leader of a band of Serbian "committachi," one of those bands of a nationalist bandits who prey only on their country's enemies, who raid in Macedonia and other soil. He arranged that we should get from his band the necessary hand grenades and Browning automatic pistols...
These arms were sent through certain secret channels, which were always open to us in Bosnia, and found their way to a little town on the outskirts of Sarajevo. They
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remained there until two days before the assassination, when they were brought into Sarajevo, one by one, by the most innocent looking carriers, to the house of the school teacher life. The night before the murder he took them to a bakeshop in the center of the town, where they were distributed next morning.
The fateful morning dawned. Two hours before Francis Ferdinand arrived in Sarajevo all the twenty-two conspirators were in their allotted positions, armed and ready. They were distributed five hundred yards apart over the whole route along which the Archduke must travel from the railroad station to the town hall.
When Francis Ferdinand and his retinue drove from the station they were allowed to pass the first two conspirators. The motor cars were driving too fast to make an attempt feasible and in the crowd were many Serbians; throwing a grenade would have killed many innocent people.
When the car passed Gabrinovic, the compositor, he threw his grenade. It hit the side of the car, but Francis Ferdinand with presence of mind threw himself back and was uninjured. Several officiers riding in his attendance were injured. The cars sped to the Town Hall and the rest of the conspirators did not interfere with them. After the reception in the Town Hall General Potiorek, the Austrian Commander, pleaded with Francis Ferdinand to leave the city, as it was seething with rebellion. The Archduke was persuaded to drive the shortest way out of the city and to go quickly.
The road to the maneuvers was shaped like the letter "V," making a sharp turn at the bridge over the River Nilgacka. Francis 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
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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, scraped the skin from his neck with the edges of their swords, tortured him, all but killed him.
The next day they put chains on Princip's feet, which he wore till his death....
I was placed in the cell next to Princip's, and when Princip was taken out to walk in the prison yard I was taken along as his companion.
By Oct. 12, the date of Princip's trial, his prison sufferings had worn him to a skeleton.
His sentence was twenty years imprisonment at hard labor, the death sentence being inapplicable because he was a minor.
Awakened in the middle of the night and told that he was to be carried off to another prison, Princip made an appeal to the prison governor:
"There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is alrady ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light people on their path to freedom."
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