June 28, 1914: The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand Sparks World War I

June 28, 1914, 100 years ago: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, are assassinated in Sarajevo, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to whose throne the Archduke was the immediate heir.

The Empire then stretched from the Alps to the Black Sea, but had so many different ethnicities under its domain that it was hard to keep it together. Franz Ferdinand, 50, was the heir presumptive to the throne, the nephew of the Emperor, Franz Josef, 83. Franz Ferdinand was no friend to the Serbs: At various times, he called them "pigs," "thieves," "murderers" and "scoundrels."

Sophie, 46, was a German princess, but not of dynastic rank, and so the Emperor refused to permit the marriage. A compromise was worked out: Franz Ferdinand could marry Sophie only if he renounced the right of succession to any of their descendants.

In 1913, Franz Ferdinand had been named inspector-general of the imperial military. He was visiting Sarajevo, with Sophie, to inspect Austrian troops there. Six members of the Black Hand, terrorists trying to establish an independent "Greater Serbia," prepared to assassinate him to make their point.

At 10:15 AM local time, Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb that bounced off the Archduke's car, a 1911 Gräf & Stift 28/32 PS Double Phaeton. The car behind it ran over it as it exploded, wounding 20 people but killing none.

(A similar thing happened with the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881. That also required a 2nd attempt by the conspirators, which, in that case, came immediately after.)

The Archduke and Archduchess arrived at the Town Hall for a reception with the Mayor, Fehim Čurčić. In his speech at the reception, the Archduke thanked the people of Sarajevo "as I see in them an expression of their joy at the failure of the attempt at assassination."

Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb a few weeks short of his 20th birthday, learned that the 1st attempt had failed. He was determined to make a 2nd attempt. Knowing the route of the motorcade would be on the Appel Quay, along the Miljacka River, he stood in front of Moritz Schiller's delicatessen, adjacent to the Latin Bridge.

The site of the assassination in 2007. Schiller's Delicatessen

is now the Museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918.

The Archduke's driver, Leopold Lojka, made a right turn, and was told that he should have turned left. He stopped, and began to turn the car around -- right in front of Princip. At 11:00 AM -- the time throughout most of Europe, 10 AM in London, 5 AM on the U.S. East Coast -- the would-be assassin had his chance, lunged forward, and fired 2 shots. Franz Ferdinand was hit in the neck, Sophie in the abdomen.

Franz Ferdinand knew he was doomed, and called out to his wife, "Sophie, Sophie! Don't die! Live for our children!" But she was already dead. Asked about his own condition, he said, "It is nothing." It wasn't: He was pronounced dead at 11:30.

Princip was unrepentant. At his trial, he said, "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria."

Princip's mug shot

On July 23, the imperial government issued the "July Ultimatum": If, within 48 hours, the semi-autonomous Serbian government did not crack down on the Black Hand, Austrian troops would come in and do so. The Serbian government did not crack down on the Black Hand, and on July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia. If that had been the end of it, Austria would have won what would have remained an internal uprising.

That was not the end of it. The Serbs appealed to their allies, the Russian Empire. On July 31, Czar Nicholas II ordered mobilization. Had that been the end of it, Russia likely would have won the war, the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have been broken up, a united Slavic nation would have been formed in the Balkans, and Russia would have emerged as perhaps the strongest nation on the European continent, on a level with France and Germany.

That was not the end of it. The German Empire came to the aid of their neighbor and linguistic brother Austria. On August 1, Kaiser Wilhelm II -- a cousin of Czar Nicholas -- declared war on Russia. If that had been the end of it, Germany vs. Russia would have been a brutal war, but Russia's superior numbers would not have saved them against Germany's more advanced military, and the German Empire would have taken big parts of the Russian one, including Poland, and emerged as perhaps the strongest nation in the world, at the very least on the same level as the British Empire and the United States of America.

That was not the end of it. Also on August 1, France mobilized in support of its ally, Russia. On August 3, Germany declared war on France. If that had been the end of it, it would have been a two-front war, but Germany would probably have beaten France, as it had in 1870, and as its predecessor nation, the Holy Roman Empire, had in 1815.

That was not the end of it. On August 4, in support of allies France and Russia, the British Empire declared war on Germany. Britain's King George V was a cousin of both the Kaiser and the Czar: All 3 were grandsons of Queen Victoria, whose 9 children had married into several royal families, to the point where her son, George's father, King Edward VII, was known as "The Uncle of Europe." (He was married to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, and her father, King Christian IX, was called "The Father-in-Law of Europe.")

Everyone thought "The Great War" would be over by Christmas. Instead, in September, because the British were there to support the French, a stalemate developed on the Western Front, and Germany couldn't redirect troops to assist those on the Eastern Front.

Emperor Franz Joseph died on November 21, 1916. He was succeeded by a grandnephew, who took the throne as Charles I, Emperor of Austria, and Karl IV, King of Hungary, in the "Dual Monarchy."

America entered the war on April 6, 1917, after Germany began attacking American ships aiding the Allies, and after it attempted to get Mexico into the war on its side. (This failed.) Russia collapsed, and there were 2 revolutions in 1917. The 1st, in March, overthrew the Czar, and attempted to establish a republic. The 2nd, in November, overthrew that, and the new government of Vladimir Lenin was Communist. It took the Czar and his family prisoner, and executed them all on July 17, 1918.

Lenin took Russia out of the war on March 3, 1918. With the Eastern Front rendered unnecessary, the Germans, themselves on the verge of collapse, could throw everything onto the Western Front, and were about to win, a great come-from-behind victory, when American troops were finally able to enter combat on June 1.

On November 11, 1918, 2 days after the Kaiser admitted the inevitable, and abdicated, fleeing to the Netherlands, the Germans surrendered. The Great War, the World War, "The War to End All Wars," was over. There were over 10 million military personnel killed, and at least that many civilians. New nations were created, including an independent Poland, and the combined Slavic nation the conspirators of June 1914 wanted, named Yugoslavia.

Most of them were not around to appreciate this. Most of the conspirators were under age 20, and considered minors, and not executed, but that didn't necessarily keep them alive long enough to see the war's end. Veljko Čubrilović, Danilo Ilić and Mihajlo "Miško" Jovanović were executed by hanging on February 3, 1915. Čabrinović died in prison of tuberculosis on January 20, 1916, age 20. Just 23 days later, Mayor Čurčić also died of tuberculosis, at 50. 

Trifun Grabež also died in prison of tuberculosis, on October 21, 1916. Princip would also die in prison of tuberculosis, on April 28, 1918. A prison psychiatrist who examined Princip wrote he believed the World War was bound to happen, independent of his actions, and that he "cannot feel himself responsible for the catastrophe."

Lojka died in 1926, at 39, but I can't find a cause of death. To the end of his life, he claimed to still hear the voices telling him he had made a wrong turn.

Vaso Čubrilović, Veljko's brother, at 17 the youngest of the conspirators, lived to see the end of World War I. and was then released. So was Cvjetko Popović. When Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Vaso was arrested, and sent to a concentration camp. He survived that, too. Popović lived until 1980. Vaso was the last survivor of the events, dying on June 11, 1990 -- not quite living to see the breakup of Yugoslavia and the awful multi-front civil war that followed.

Both the death car and Princip's pistol are now in the Museum of Military History in Vienna, the capital of the Republic of Austria. The museum on the site of Schiller's Delicatessen includes a replica of that pistol, and has placed brass footprints where Princip stood as he fired. They had to be replaced in 1945 after the Nazis broke them up, and again in 1995 after the Serbs bombed it.

In 2014, the BBC began its commemorations of the Centennial of World War I. Among its productions was something unimaginable in 1914: Actors playing the leading figures in the buildup to the war, engaging in a rap battle: Princip, Franz Joseph, Nicholas II, Wilhelm II and George V. A figure playing Field Marshal Joseph Joffre represented France, but, oddly, had no lines in the battle.

Except for the Czar, played by a much larger, scarier-looking man, the actors looked the part and had the right accents. But I'm still not sure if the actor playing Franz Joseph was an actual old man, or a younger guy in makeup. There was also nobody representing the other countries that got in: No Wilson for America, no Robert Borden for Canada, no Andrew Fisher for Australia, no King Victor Emmanuel III for Italy, and no Sultan Mehmed V or General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk for the Ottoman Empire.