who assassinated franz ferdinand and where

#Who assassinated franz ferdinand and where how to#

No, the reason the alleged Serbian backing of the Sarajevo assassination is so compelling is the war itself-for how to explain the Sarajevo assassination has become an escape hatch for the true criminals in Europe’s “civilized” capitals. This should not be surprising, and not because the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s put Serbian nationalism again on display. Yet the demonization of official Serbia and its uncontrollable nationalist factions persists as the main explanation for the Sarajevo assassination. The Black Hand leaders knew this, which is why there’s evidence that they actually tried to stop the conspiracy that they never initiated in the first place. Serbia, meanwhile, did not need a war with a European Great Power, particularly on the heels of its hard-fought victories in the Balkan Wars (1912/1913). Far closer to the truth is that Princip and his co-Bosnian conspirators needed no more motivation to organize and execute the assassination than their patent suffering under Habsburg rule, as they insisted repeatedly at their trial. Yet no official Serbian organization sponsored them, and there’s no evidence that anyone but rogue rebels in the Black Hand acted to aid the Bosnians, rather than the highly nationalist military faction itself.

It’s true that the assassins concocted their plot in Belgrade and obtained their weapons, training, and logistical support in Serbia. The issue is not merely inaccuracy or exaggeration, but that it’s part of the mythology that has accumulated around the Sarajevo assassination. Some scholars have thus even latched onto analogies between the Black Hand “terrorist network” and today’s Islamic fundamentalists. It’s all very subversive and satisfying to our contemporary sensibilities. Such an interpretation is strengthened by the fact that myriad accounts of the political murder depict Princip and his accomplices as “Serbs” or “Serb nationalists” backed by a “secret” Serbian “terrorist” organization: Unification or Death, more notoriously known as the Black Hand. It would be easy to conclude from this sparse summary of Balkan tensions that the Sarajevo assassination was driven by Serbian resentment over Austrian control of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile, the annexation was accepted by the other Great Powers as a fait accompli. And while the Serbs were, literally, up in arms and made a big show of mobilizing their meager army, they stood no chance without Russian backing. It has been called the prelude to World War I, though it by no means made that war “inevitable.” Russia, which sought control over the central Balkan region possibly through its partner state Serbia, was too weak to fight back in the wake of its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.

For the next six months, the Bosnian Crisis convulsed Europe. Then, in 1908, the Habsburg Empire annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina outright. It poured enormous resources into developing the territory economically, though scant benefits were seen by peasants like Princip’s family, who resented their poverty and repression under Austrian rule as much as they had the Ottomans’ long reign. Austria-Hungary had administered Bosnia since taking over from the declining Ottoman Empire in 1878. At its core were the South Slavs of Bosnia-Herzegovina-Muslims, Catholic Croats, and, above all, Orthodox Serbs that Serbia claimed as its rightful irredenta, its “unredeemed” peoples. That crisis may have been short-lived, but the conflict between the venerable Habsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary) and the upstart (and far smaller) kingdom of Serbia had been brewing for decades. The First World War began not with Gavrilo Princip’s pistols shots, but because European statesmen were unable to resolve the July Crisis that ensued. One month later, what most Europeans also took for “nothing” became “something” when the Archduke’s uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, declared war on Serbia for allegedly harboring the criminal elements and tolerating the propaganda that prompted the assassination. It was 28 June 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Shot through the neck, choking on his own blood with his beloved wife dying beside him, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, managed a few words before losing consciousness: “It’s nothing,” he repeatedly said of his fatal wound.

Who assassinated franz ferdinand and where