164 THE SARAJEVO ASSASSINATION. THE FIRST TO BE KILLED.pdf

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1914

2014

SARAJEVO

THE SARAJEVO

ASSASSINATION

THE FIRST TO BE KILLED

6 4

770306 154103

No. 164

£5.00

NUMBER 164

After the Battle

2014

Editor: Karel Margry

Editor-in-Chief: Winston G. Ramsey

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Left:

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Heir Apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne,

was born at Graz on December 18, 1863 as the eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig of

Austria (the younger brother of Emperor Franz Josef) and his second wife, Princess

Maria Annunciata of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. He became heir to the throne in 1889, after

his cousin, Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide, and his father, who was now first

in line to succeed the Emperor, renounced in favour of his son. In 1900, he married

Countess Sophie Chotek, much to the aggravation of the Emperor and his courtiers,

who disapproved of the fact that she was not a member of one of the grand dynasties

of Europe. Franz Josef would only approve of the marriage on the condition that none

of her descendants would ever rise to the throne. Sophie herself was not allowed to

share her husband’s rank, rights or privileges, being continuously forced to stand far

down the line, separated from her spouse, at court events.

Right:

Despite the handi-

cap, the couple had a happy marriage which bore them three children: Sophie (born

1901), Maximilian (1902) and Ernst (1904). In 1913, Franz Ferdinand was appointed

Inspector General of all the armed forces of Austria-Hungary, and it was in this

capacity that he and his wife came to visit Bosnia and Sarajevo in June 1914.

CONTENTS

THE SARAJEVO ASSASSINATION

UNITED KINGDOM

The Woolwich Arsenal Parachute

Mine

IT HAPPENED HERE

The First to be Killed in Action

Front Cover:

Fatal shots fired from this

spot in Sarajevo were the catalyst for the

outbreak of the First World War. (Karel

Margry)

Back Cover:

Corporal Thomas Priday, aged

27, was always believed to be the first

soldier to be killed in action in the Second

World War, but in fact he died as a result

of friendly fire. Each year on the

anniversary of his death in December

1939, members of ASCH (a French

association dedicated to the preservation

of the Maginot Line forts) hold a

Ceremony of Remembrance by his grave

at Luttange. Here a corporal of the

Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and a

sergeant of the Black Watch, pipe major,

pay their respects. (Arnault Jaffart)

Acknowledgements:

For their help with the

First to be Killed story, the Editor would like

to thank Bernard Bettenfeld, Charles Ledig,

Adrien Masson, Pascal Moretti, Arnaud

Quaranta, Jean Pascal Speck, Daniel Taylor,

Stuart Wheeler, and La Comédie de

Picardie.

Photo Credit Abbreviations:

BA —

Bundesarchiv; ECPAD — Médiatèque de la

Défense, Fort d’Ivry; IWM — Imperial War

Museum; SZ — Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo

SARAJEVO

The Habsburg Empire and the Balkans, 1914.

On June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian-Serb student named Gavrilo

Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este

and his wife, Duchess Sophie von Hohenberg, as they drove

through Sarajevo in an open car during an official visit to the city.

Princip was one of six assassins that lay in wait that day along the

royal couple’s route. The murder of the heir to the Habsburg

throne precipitated a political and military crisis between the

Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy and the neighbouring Kingdom

of Serbia, which within a month mushroomed into the catastrophe

of the First World War. The assassination ‘that shook the world’

occurred on the corner of Appel Quay and Franz Josef Street,

across the road from the Latin Bridge over the Miljacka river.

THE SARAJEVO ASSASSINATION

On June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb

named Gavrilo Princip murdered Archduke

Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-

Hungarian Empire, and his wife during an

official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sara-

jevo. Princip was one of six young men who

stood ready that day to kill the Archduke.

They were misguided idealists, unwitting

instruments in a larger conspiracy that had

been concocted by a secret Serb terrorist

organisation known as The Black Hand,

which had close ties with Serbia’s military

intelligence department. The assassination

triggered off an international political crisis

which within a month escalated into the First

World War. Neither the young assassins, nor

their more-experienced behind-the-scene

sponsors, ever intended, nor could they pos-

sibly have anticipated, that their plot would

have such dire consequences, leading directly

to the death of millions.

PAN-SLAVISM AND THE YOUNG

BOSNIANS

In early 1914 the Balkans was a hotbed of

political unrest and agitation. The region

where the Ottoman Empire, in an advanced

state of dissolution, and the Habsburg

Empire, also known as the Austro-Hungar-

ian dual monarchy, were closest to one

another contained several ethnic groups that

all belonged to the Slavic people. Serbs,

Bosnians, Croats and Slovenes all spoke

basically the same language and belonged to

the same cultural entity. However, whereas

Serbia was an independent kingdom, Bosnia-

Herzegovina, Slovenia and Croatia were all

part of the Habsburg Empire.

Bosnia-Herzegovina had been occupied

by the Austrians in 1876 — a situation that

had been confirmed by the Treaty of Berlin

of 1878. It fermented discontent among the

Serbs, who felt betrayed at losing territory

that by rights, they believed, belonged to

them, and among those who thought the

Austrians did nothing to improve the plight

of the Bosnian peasants, the

kmets,

who

were still locked in an oppressive feudal

system.

In the 1890s a movement sprang up known

as Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia). An expres-

sion of radical Serb nationalism, it comprised

a network of secret societies formed by

young Serb students, mostly from poor peas-

ant backgrounds, who were united in their

hatred of the Austrians. Fervently patriotic

and romantically believing in the unification

of all Serbs in one pan-Slavic state, they

By Karel Margry

spent their days reading about socialism and

revolution, plotting rebellion, debating with

friends in cafés, and engaging in political agi-

tation, strikes and street demonstrations.

Many of the young firebrands saw terrorism

as their main weapon, and dreamed of assas-

sination plots — against Austrian Emperor

Franz Josef, or against high officials of the

regime. Though without formal structure or

leadership, the movement’s spiritual guiding

light was Vladimir Gacinovic, an essayist and

poet, a friend of Leon Trotsky, who lived in

exile in Lausanne, Switzerland.

A century later the view across the Latin Bridge has changed very little.

ATB

The three assassins that came from Belgrade (L-R): Gavrilo Princip, Trifun Grabez and Nedeljko Cabrinovic, all 19 years old.

Discontent and frustration among the

Serbs and the Young Bosnians reached a

new zenith in October 1908 when the Austri-

ans went one step further and formally

annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Habs-

burg Empire, creating a puppet Bosnian par-

liament in Sarajevo.

Serb nationalism gave birth to a whole

range of militant organisations — some overt

and legal, some secret and clandestine, some

outright terrorist.

In 1908, in reaction to the Austrian seizure

of Bosnia, Serb nationalists in Belgrade set up

the Narodna Odbrana (National Defence), a

semi-secret organisation designed to mobilise

troops to fight the Austrians and recapture

the territory. The organisation’s recruitment

office, known as the Komitee and led by

Major Vojislav Tankosic, became a magnet

for Young Bosnians and other Pan-Slavic

patriots, recruiting and training volunteers for

the perceived struggle ahead. However, in

1909, after political expediency forced Serbia

to humiliatingly accept the Austrian annexa-

tion of Bosnia, the Narodna Odbrana was

ostensibly transformed into an institution for

the promotion of Serb culture, with local

branches in many towns and villages. In real-

ity, it continued to function as a militant

organisation, running a secret network of Serb

agents and spies within Bosnia.

Major Tankosic’s Komitee also continued

to function. Its recruits fought as paramili-

tary guerrillas both in the First Balkan War

(1912-13) when Serbia joined forces with

Bulgaria and Greece and attacked the

Ottoman Empire, and in the Second Balkan

War (1913) when Serbia lined up with

Greece, Rumania and Turkey to turn upon

Bulgaria.

One of the secret societies that hoped to

achieve Slav unity through the use of terror-

ism was called Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Unity or

Death), also known as Crna Ruka (The

Black Hand). Formed in May 1911 by offi-

cers of the Serbian Army, its leading figure

was Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevitch (also

known as Apis), who was also the Chief of

Serbian Military Intelligence. Dimitrijevitch

was an old hand at political murder. Back in

May 1903, he and fellow junior officers

(among them Tankosic) had successfully

assassinated the despotic and hated King

Alexander I Obrenovic and his wife Queen

Draga and installed Peter I of the rival

House of Karadordevic as the new king of

Serbia. The Black Hand was organised at the

grassroots level in cells of three to five mem-

bers, supervised by district committees and

by a Central Committee in Belgrade whose

ten-member Executive Committee was led

by Apis. From 1911 onwards, the Black

Hand engaged in hatching plans for political

murders against the Austrians.

Meanwhile, within Bosnia, political unrest

was reaching boiling point. In June 1910, a

Young Bosnian, Bogdan Zerajic, tried to

shoot the iron-fisted Austrian governor of

Bosnia, General Marijan Varesanin, in Sara-

jevo. He failed but committed suicide on the

spot, becoming the Young Bosnians’ first

and main martyr. In May 1913, faced with

growing discontent and student demonstra-

tions on the streets, Varesanin’s successor as

governor, General Oskar Potiorek, intro-

duced emergency measures, banning assem-

blies, closing schools, suspending courts and

confiscating Serb newspapers.

Prosecuted by the Austrian authorities in

Bosnia, often expelled from their schools or

fired from their jobs because of political

activities, many Young Bosnians during this

time went to live or spent time in Serbia,

especially in Belgrade, where they found a

large community of fellow radical compa-

triots.

One of them was a 19-year-old student,

Gavrilo Princip. Born on July 13, 1894 in the

Bosnian village of Obljaj in the Grahovo val-

ley (near the town of Bosansko Grahovo),

the second of three sons in a poor peasant

family, he had grown to be a quiet, earnest

boy, always alone, never mingling with other

children. His elder brother Jovo, who had

prospered in the lumber transport business,

was able to pay for his education, enrolling

him at the Merchants’ School in Sarajevo at

the age of 13. A lodging address was found at

the house of Stoja Ilic, a widow who lived at

No. 3 Oprkanj Street on the edge of town.

Her son Danilo, four years older than

Gavrilo, soon became a good friend.

Danilo Ilic had already graduated from the

Merchants’ School and was waiting to enrol

at the Teachers’ College. Already in posses-

sion of a large collection of socialist and rev-

olutionary literature, he initiated young Prin-

cip in the radical ideas of the Young

Bosnians. Their friendship continued even

after money shortage forced Princip to can-

cel the room and go live with his elder

brother at Hadzici, 20 kilometres south-west

of Sarajevo, from where he travelled daily to

school. In 1910 Princip switched for a time to

the gymnasium in Tuzla, another hotbed of

radical Serb nationalism, but he was soon

back at the Sarajevo Merchants’ School.

Eternally broke, often starving, always avidly

reading — revolutionary and patriotic pam-

phlets, newspapers and books — he spent

more time engaging in anti-Austrian demon-

strations than in his studies.

In 1912, due to his low grades and rebel-

lious activism, Princip was expelled from the

school. He decided to slip away to Belgrade,

the capital of his beloved Serbia. Walking the

300 kilometres, he joined the community of

émigré Bosnian students, who like him spent

their days in cafés and reading rooms, dis-

cussing radical ideas. When the First Balkan

War broke out in October 1912, he tried to

enlist in the Komitee, the Serbian army of

guerrilla volunteers led by Major Tankosic,

but he was rejected because he was too small.

Over the next year, 1912-13, he moved back

and forth between Belgrade and Hadzici,

studying and spending time at his brother’s

home. In March 1914 he settled down in Bel-

grade again, taking a room in a boarding

house on Carigradska Street, along with sev-

eral other Young Bosnians.

One of his boarding mates was an old

friend, Trifun (Trifko) Grabez. Born in the

town of Pale, not far from Sarajevo, on June

28, 1895, the son of a Serbian Orthodox

priest, he had studied first in Sarajevo and

then at the gymnasium at Tuzla. In early

1913, due to his unruliness and political

activism, he had been ousted from school,

barred from Tuzla and expelled from Bosnia.

Like so many others, he went to Belgrade

and there continued his studies, immersing

himself in Young Bosnian circles.

One of Princip’s best friends at Belgrade

was Nedeljko (Nedjo) Cabrinovic. Born in

Sarajevo on February 2, 1895, the eldest son

of a middle-class coffee-grinding business

and café owner, he was a typesetter by trade.

Politically, he had started out as a social

democrat (at just 14, he had founded the

Printer’s Apprentice Guild) but over time

had radicalised into an anarchist, always agi-

tating, always involved in strikes. Forever at

odds with his stern and unloving father, he

had repeatedly left the family home and trav-

elled widely, always on foot, always seeking

jobs at printing presses, always hungry and

struggling for money. He had stayed at

Zagreb in Croatia for a month, lived in Bel-

grade on two occasions, gone to Trieste in

Slovenia for a period, invariably returning to

Sarajevo and more quarrels with his father.

By March 1914, he was back in Belgrade for

a third time, again joining the group of expa-

triate Young Bosnians and meeting up with

Princip. A jovial fellow and a charmer of

ladies, more a radical socialist than a Serb

nationalist, he was not always regarded as a

reliable revolutionary by his fellow Young

Bosnians.

Right:

Three of the conspirators pictured

in a park in Belgrade, the capital of Ser-

bia, in early 1914 (L-R): Grabez, Djuro

Sarac (the man who introduced the

aspiring assassins to the Black Hand

secret society for terrorism) and Princip.

Some publications name the man on the

left as Nedjo Cabrinovic and the one in

the centre as Milan Ciganovic, the Black

Hand member who provided the murder

team with weapons and gave them

weapon training, but these identifica-

tions appear to be wrong.

START OF THE CONSPIRACY

At the end of March 1914, a friend from

Sarajevo sent Cabrinovic a newspaper clip-

ping. It announced that Archduke Franz Fer-

dinand, the Habsburg Heir Apparent, would

come to Sarajevo with his wife to observe

Austrian Army manoeuvres. When Cabri-

novic showed the cutting to Princip in a café

later that day, the latter took him out for a

stroll in the park and, seated on a park

bench, suggested that they together carry out

an assassination of the Archduke. After a

short hesitation, Cabrinovic agreed. Some

time later, having decided that they needed a

third person to complete their terrorist cell,

they approached Grabez, who readily agreed

to take part.

Their main problem now was how to

acquire the weapons needed for such an

attempt. For weeks they could not solve this

problem but eventually Princip asked a

Young Bosnian friend of his, Djuro Sarac, a

veteran of the 1912 Balkan War, to introduce

him to him to Milan Ciganovic, a 28-year-old

Bosnian Serb, employed as a clerk on the

Serbian State Railway, who was well known

among Young Bosnians as a member of the

Komitee and decorated veteran of the 1912

war. (Princip may not have realised it but

both Sarac and Ciganovic were members of

the Black Hand.) Ciganovic said he could

help and in turn contacted Major Tankosic,

the Komitee leader (a main member of the

Black Hand), and he in turn contacted

Colonel Dimitrijevitch (Colonel Apis), the

chief of Serb military intelligence (and the

senior figure of the Black Hand).

Dimitrijevitch, who had been planning to

kill the Archduke since March, probably saw

the trio of Young Bosnians as a ready-made

murder team delivered to him on a plate. He

ordered Tankosic to provide them with

weapons, give them weapon training, and see

to it that they receive help in smuggling the

arms into Bosnia.

Dimitrijevitch had two reasons for wanting

Franz Ferdinand out of the way. Firstly, he

knew the future emperor was in favour of

political reforms that might give the Serbs

more equal rights within the Habsburg

Empire — which would undermine Serbia’s

own plans to unify all Serbs. Secondly, he

feared that the army manoeuvres in Bosnia,

which the Archduke was coming to inspect,

were in fact the precursor of an all-out Aus-

trian invasion of Serbia.

The end result was that Ciganovic

reported back to Princip with the news that

he would provide them with guns and bombs

to carry out the assassination. Ciganovic took

Grabez to the office of Major Tankosic to

collect the weapons but when the latter

learned that none of the three prospective

assassins knew how to handle a gun, he gave

Ciganovic one pistol and instructed him to

first teach them to shoot. Over the next six

days, Ciganovic took Princip and Grabez to

Belgrade’s Topcider Park for shooting prac-

tice in the park’s forest. Cabrinovic, who had

a daytime job, could not come but Princip

later taught him the basics and he practiced a

little on the Belgrade Gun Club firing range.

The rest of the weapons were delivered on

May 26. In all, the young men were supplied

with four guns (all Belgian-made 9mm

Browning semi-automatic pistols) and six

bombs (Serb-made small rectangular military

bombs with a 12-second time-delay).

Ciganovic also provided them with some

money; a special map showing the location of

gendarme barracks and guard posts in Bosnia;

knowledge of contacts and safe-houses on a

clandestine route used to infiltrate agents and

arms into Austria-Hungary, and a small card

authorising the use of that route.

At Ciganovic’s insistence, the aspiring

assassins agreed to commit suicide immedi-

ately after the attempt, even if they did not

succeed, so as to preserve the secrets of the

plot and not betray each other or any of the

other accomplices or behind-the-scene

organisers.

Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevitch (also

known as Apis), the Chief of Serbian Mil-

itary Intelligence and the leading figure

of the Black Hand. It was Apis who —

behind the scenes — set up and directed

the conspiracy to kill the Archduke.

Thus the amateur assassins Princip, Cabri-

novic and Grabez got entangled in the Black

Hand conspiracy to kill Franz Ferdinand.

Probably without fully realising it, they had

become agents carrying out orders from

Colonel Apis. Though much of this episode

remains shrouded in mystery, it seems clear

that the idea to kill the Archduke had been

their own but that, in seeking ways and

means to carry it out, they had allowed them-

selves — knowingly or unknowingly — to be

drawn into the web of the Black Hand, being

recruited into a larger murder scheme that

had been underway for some time.

As it happened, the Black Hand conspir-

acy also involved Danilo Ilic, the young revo-

lutionary in whose mother’s house in Sara-

jevo Princip had lodged back in 1907. By late

1913, Ilic was a school teacher and co-editor

Zvono

(the Bell), a socialist journal that

he had founded. However, in secret, he was

also the leader of the Black Hand cell in

Sarajevo.

In December 1913 he had gone to see

Colonel Apis in Belgrade. It is unknown

what was discussed but soon after, in January

1914, Apis’ right-hand man, Major Tankosic

called a meeting at Toulouse, France.

Among those present were Vladimir Gaci-

novic, the Young Bosnians’ spiritual leader

(who was also secretly the Black Hand’s dis-

trict leader for Bosnia); Ilic (local leader for

Sarajevo) and Muhamed Mehmedbasic, a 27-

year-old Muslim from Stolac in Herzegovina,

a carpenter by trade, who was eager to get

involved in murder plots against the Austri-

ans. The aim of the meeting was to discuss

possible targets for assassination. After dis-

cussing various options, the participants

decided to despatch Mehmedbasic (who was

sworn in as a Black Hand member during the

meeting) to Sarajevo to kill General

Potiorek, the governor of Bosnia.

However, this plan went awry almost as

soon as it started. On his way to Bosnia from

France, police searched Mehmedbasic’s train

for a thief, and he, thinking the police might

be after him, threw his weapons, a dagger

and a bottle of poison, out of the train win-

dow. Thus, he had to start looking for

replacement weapons. However, before he

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