Gavrilo Princip
Gavrilo Princip weighed only about 40 kilograms when he died in a Habsburg prison on the 28th of April 1918. Tuberculosis and prolonged malnutrition had worn the Bosnian Serb student down to almost nothing. Nearly four years earlier, this slight young man had shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. Within a month, the killings had pushed Europe toward the First World War. This documentary asks how the son of a poor farmer, born in a remote mountain hamlet, came to stand on that Sarajevo street. It asks how a plot built around a newspaper cutting came close to failing before he ever fired. And it asks why Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks still cannot agree on what to call him.
Obljaj, a remote hamlet near Bosansko Grahovo in western Bosnia, was where Gavrilo Princip was born on the 25th of July 1894. Austria-Hungary governed Bosnia at the time, although the province was still formally Ottoman. Gavrilo was the second of nine children, and six of the nine died in infancy. His mother Marija wanted to name the sickly baby Špiro, after her late brother. A local Eastern Orthodox priest insisted on Gavrilo instead. He claimed that a child named for the Archangel Gabriel would be more likely to survive.
The Princips were Serbs of the Orthodox faith who had lived in northwestern Bosnia for centuries. Their ancestors came from Grahovo in Montenegro and emigrated in the early 1700s. They belonged to the Jovićević clan. Gavrilo's parents, Petar and Marija, née Mićić, lived off the small plot of land they owned. They were part of the Christian peasantry the Ottomans called kmetovi, meaning serfs, and Muslim landlords often oppressed them.
Petar farmed around 4 acres in the Grahovo valley and handed a third of his income to his landlord. To make ends meet, he carried mail and passengers over the mountains between northwestern Bosnia and Dalmatia. In his youth he had fought the Ottomans in the Herzegovina Uprising. He also demanded what he called "strict correctness". He never drank or swore, and his neighbours mocked him for it.
In 1903, at the age of nine, Gavrilo started primary school over his father's objections, since Petar needed a shepherd for his sheep. The first year was hard. After that he excelled, and his headmaster rewarded him with a collection of Serbian epic poetry.
At thirteen he was sent to Sarajevo. His elder brother Jovan first meant to enrol him at the Austro-Hungarian Military Academy. A shopkeeper warned Jovan against raising "an executioner of his own people", and Jovan changed his mind before Gavrilo arrived. Gavrilo entered the Merchants' School instead. After three years he moved on to the Sarajevo Gymnasium. Jovan paid for all of it with manual labour, hauling logs from the forests around the city to its mills, and that sacrifice was about to meet his younger brother's politics.
The Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908 left the region's South Slavs yearning for independence. Student groups sprang up around romantic nationalism, nihilism and anti-imperialism. At school, and through his roommate Danilo Ilić, Princip also met socialist, anarchist and communist writing. He fell in with young nationalist revolutionaries and came to admire Bogdan Žerajić.
Žerajić, like Princip a Bosnian Serb from Herzegovina, had tried to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina and then taken his own life. Many saw in him the ideal of self-sacrifice. Each year on the anniversary of his death, Serb youths from Sarajevo laid flowers at his grave. According to Luigi Albertini, Princip spent nights reflecting at that grave and resolved to carry out an attack of his own.
In 1911 Princip finished the fourth grade and joined Young Bosnia, called Mlada Bosna. Its members came from all three major Bosnian ethnic groups. They wanted Austro-Hungarian rule ended and all Southern Slavs united in a common nation. Some believed that the independent Kingdom of Serbia, as the free part of the South Slavs, owed help to that cause. Local authorities forbade student clubs, so the members met in secret to discuss literature, ethics and politics.
On the 18th of February 1912, Princip joined a demonstration against Habsburg authority in Sarajevo, organised by Luka Jukić, a Croat student from Bosnia. Protesters burned a Hungarian flag, and police injured and arrested many of them. A sabre struck Princip in the scuffle and tore his clothes. The next day the students declared a general strike. For the first time in Bosnian history, Croats, Serbs and Muslims took part together. One student remembered that "Princip went from class to class, threatening with his knuckle-duster all the boys who wavered in coming to the new demonstrations."
Expelled for his conduct, Princip decided in the spring of 1912 to go to Belgrade. He covered the 280 kilometres, about 170 miles, on foot. By one account he fell to his knees and kissed the ground on crossing into Serbia. He had left Sarajevo without telling his brother. In Belgrade he lived without money, among other Bosnian students. In June 1912 he sat the fifth-grade exam at the First Belgrade Gymnasium and failed.
War broke out between the Balkan states and Turkey in October 1912. Princip went to a Belgrade recruitment office to volunteer for the komite, the irregular Serbian units, and was turned away for his small build. At Prokuplje, in southern Serbia north of the Turkish frontier, Major Vojislav Tankosić commanded all the Komite units. He took one look at Princip and rejected him as too small and too weak. Humiliated, Princip went back briefly to Belgrade and then to the village of Hadžići. Vladimir Dedijer judged that this rejection was among the main forces pushing him toward some exceptionally brave act.
The Serbian army's unexpected success set off celebrations across the South Slav lands. On the 2nd of May 1913, General Oskar Potiorek, the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, answered with a state of emergency. He suspended the 1910 constitution, imposed martial law and took control of all schools. He also banned every Serb public, cultural and educational society. Potiorek's name would soon turn up again, as a possible target for the conspirators.
Early in 1914, Princip left Sarajevo for Belgrade, stopping briefly in his village to see his parents. In Belgrade he was studying for exams at the First Belgrade High School. There his friend Nedeljko Čabrinović showed him a newspaper cutting announcing that Archduke Franz Ferdinand would visit Bosnia in June. Princip decided to lead a group of assassins back home to strike during the official visit to Sarajevo.
He won over Čabrinović and Trifko Grabež, an old schoolfriend. The three also discussed killing Potiorek, as a protest against the emergency regime. Weapons were the next problem. Princip turned to his Bosnian Muslim friend Djulaga Bukovac, a veteran of the Balkan wars. Bukovac introduced the group to Milan Ciganović, a Bosnian expatriate who had fought under Major Tankosić in the Second Balkan War.
Ciganović was a freemason and an associate of the Black Hand. This secretive, ultra-nationalist Serbian group had been responsible for the regicide of 1903. Tankosić, the same major who had turned Princip away, was a Black Hand member of Bosnian descent. Ciganović approached him, and Tankosić supplied the weapons.
On the 27th of May 1914, Ciganović handed the three young Bosnians five Browning pistols, six grenades and several vials of poison. He took them to Topčider forest, just outside the centre of Belgrade, and trained them to use the weapons. Princip proved the best marksman of the three.
The team left Belgrade on the 28th of May 1914 aboard a river boat that took them to Šabac. There they split up and crossed the border into Bosnia separately. Each man carried two bombs tied around his waist, plus pistols, ammunition and a bottle of cyanide. Before leaving Serbia, Princip wrote to his former roommate Danilo Ilić in Sarajevo. He told Ilić of the plan and asked him to recruit more people.
Ilić found three. Muhamed Mehmedbašić was a Bosnian Muslim carpenter. Cvetko Popović and Vaso Čubrilović were Bosnian Serb students, aged eighteen and seventeen. The youngest of them, Čubrilović, was still a schoolboy.
Shortly before 10 a.m. on Sunday the 28th of June 1914, a train brought Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie Chotek, into Sarajevo. Their car was the third in a six-car motorcade heading for the Town Hall. Princip and five other conspirators had taken positions along the Appel Quay. Each had been told to strike when the royal car drew level with him.
The first man, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, stood near the Austro-Hungarian Bank. He lost his nerve and let the car go by. At 10:15 a.m., as the motorcade passed the central police station, the 19-year-old student Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a grenade at the Archduke's car. The driver sped up when he saw it. The grenade had a 10-second delay and went off under the fourth car, seriously wounding two of its occupants. The motorcade raced away, and the remaining conspirators, Princip among them, could not act because of the speed of the vehicles.
The Archduke gave his scheduled speech at the Town Hall. Afterward he chose to visit the victims of the grenade at the Sarajevo Hospital. To keep the car out of the city centre, General Potiorek ordered it to run straight along the Appel Quay. He failed to tell the driver, Leopold Lojka, a Czech, about the change.
Lojka followed the original plan and turned onto a side street. Princip happened to be standing there, in front of a delicatessen. Potiorek shouted at the driver to stop. Lojka halted and began to reverse, and as he did so the engine stalled and the gears locked.
Princip stepped forward, drew an FN Model 1910 semi-automatic pistol and fired twice at close range into the car. The first bullet hit the Archduke in the neck. The second struck the Duchess in the abdomen. Both died shortly afterward.
On the 13th of July 1914, the Austro-Hungarian official Friedrich Wiesner submitted a report on the murders. He found no evidence that the Serbian government was implicated, and his conclusion reached Vienna. Austria-Hungary nonetheless saw Serbian nationalism as a direct threat to its multi-ethnic empire. It seized on the assassination as a pretext for action against Serbia.
The Black Hand had supplied the assassins' weapons and helped them cross the border, so the society was implicated. That did not prove that the Serbian government knew of the plot, let alone approved it. It was still enough for Vienna to send Serbia a démarche known as the July Ultimatum. According to David Fromkin, the killings gave Vienna not a reason but an excuse for destroying Serbia.
The murders set off the July Crisis, a rapid run of diplomatic and military escalations among Europe's great powers. On the 28th of July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days Germany, France, Russia and Great Britain issued their own declarations of war. Samuel Williamson, a leading authority on Austria-Hungary and its road to war, holds that Vienna's determination to exploit the assassination and dominate the Balkans was the main driver of the conflict.
Before Princip could fire a third time, someone wrested the pistol from his hand and pushed him to the ground. He managed to swallow a capsule of cyanide, but it failed to kill him. His trial opened on the 12th of October 1914 and ran until the 23rd of October. Twenty-five people were indicted, Princip among them.
All six assassins except Mehmedbašić were under twenty. Bosnian Serbs dominated the group, but four of the accused were Bosnian Croats. All were Austro-Hungarian citizens, and none came from Serbia. The state's attorney charged twenty-two of them with high treason and murder and three with complicity in the murder.
Princip said he regretted killing the Duchess, since he had meant to kill Potiorek. He was nonetheless proud of what he had done. Austrian police investigators were eager, for political reasons, to stress the purely Serbian character of the plot. The authorities even changed the name of one conspirator in press reports to hide the involvement of Croats and Bosniaks. Princip insisted that although he was an ethnic Serb, his commitment was to freeing all South Slavs. He told the court:
"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 free from Austria... The plan was to unite all South Slavs. It was understood that Serbia as the free part of the South Slavs had the moral duty to help in the unification, to be to the South Slavs as the Piedmont was to Italy... In my opinion every Serb, Croat and Slovene should be an enemy of Austria."
On Thursday the 28th of October 1914, the court found Princip guilty of murder and high treason. Under Habsburg law he was twenty-seven days short of the twenty-year minimum age for execution. He received the maximum sentence of twenty years. He was to serve it in a military prison inside the Habsburg fortress of Theresienstadt in northern Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic.
At the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt, present-day Terezín, Princip was chained to a wall and held in solitary confinement. His tuberculosis worsened under the harsh conditions and eventually led to the amputation of his right arm. Some historians have suggested that his illness affected his state of mind. Most scholarship stresses political motives instead.
From February to June 1916, Martin Pappenheim, a psychiatrist in the Austro-Hungarian army, interviewed Princip four times. According to Pappenheim, Princip said the First World War would have come even without the Sarajevo assassination. He added that he "cannot feel himself responsible for the catastrophe". Two years after his death, his body would be moved again, to Sarajevo.
Few figures have been judged so differently by different governments. For the Habsburg monarchy and its supporters, Princip was a murderous terrorist. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia portrayed him as a Yugoslav hero. During the Second World War, the Nazis and the Croatian fascist Ustaše saw a degenerate criminal and a left-wing anarchist. Socialist Yugoslavia made him a youthful hero of armed resistance, a freedom fighter for workers and the oppressed. In the 1990s, some began to see a Serbian nationalist working toward a Greater Serbia.
In 1920, Princip and the other conspirators were exhumed, brought to Sarajevo and buried together beneath the Vidovdan Heroes Chapel. Today many Serbs celebrate him as a hero, while many Croats and Bosniaks regard him as a terrorist. In 2014, Asim Sarajlić, a senior MP of the Bosniak nationalist Party of Democratic Action, said Princip ended "a golden era of history under Austrian rule". He added, "we are strongly against the mythology of Princip as a fighter of freedom".
That same year, Nenad Samardžija, the Serb governor of East Sarajevo, said Bosnians "once all lived in one state (Yugoslavia), and we never looked on it as any kind of terrorist act". He called it "a movement of young people who wanted to liberate themselves from colonial slavery". Princip's nephew Slobodan Princip was a communist who died as a Yugoslav Partisan in 1942. He was later awarded the Order of the People's Hero posthumously.
The house where Princip lived in Sarajevo has been destroyed three times. It was first lost during the First World War. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia rebuilt it as a museum, and the Croatian Ustaše destroyed it again after Germany conquered Yugoslavia in 1941. Communist Yugoslavia rebuilt it after 1944. It fell once more during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and was rebuilt for the third time in 2015.
Princip's pistol went to Anton Puntigam, a Jesuit priest and close friend of the Archduke who had given the couple their last rites. With it went the Archduke's blood-stained undershirt. The Austrian Jesuits kept both until 2004, when they were offered on long-term loan to the Museum of Military History in Vienna. They are now part of its permanent exhibition.
The site of the shooting has had its own turbulent record. In the Yugoslav era the Latin Bridge was renamed Princip's Bridge, and it reverted to Latinska Cuprija in 1992. About a half-dozen memorials to Princip have gone up in Sarajevo and been torn down with each change in power. A pillar built at the corner in 1917 was destroyed the following year.
In 1941, local Germans removed a plaque from 1930 honouring Princip. It was presented to Adolf Hitler as a birthday gift and kept in a museum, then lost after 1945. A new plaque after the Second World War claimed that "Gavrilo Princip threw off the German occupiers". During the Bosnian War, the embossed footprints marking where Princip fired were torn out.
As the centenary approached, an apolitical plaque went up at the corner. It reads: "From this place on the 28th of June 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia." On the 21st of April 2014, a bust of Princip was unveiled in Tovariševo, and on the centenary itself a statue went up in East Sarajevo. A year later, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić and Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska, unveiled a statue in Belgrade. It was a gift from Republika Srpska to Serbia. Nikolić called Princip "a hero, a symbol of liberation ideas, tyrant-killer, idea-holder of liberation from slavery, which spanned through Europe".
Film has returned to him repeatedly. Carl Balhaus played Princip in the German drama 1914 in 1931, and Irfan Mensur played him in The Day That Shook the World in 1975. The Austrian biopic Death of a Schoolboy, released in 1990, cast the British actor and director Reuben Pillsbury. Eugen Knecht took the role in the 2014 German-Austrian television film Sarajevo. Joel Basman played him in The King's Man in 2021.
On the 11th of November 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, two descendants met in Graz, Austria. Princess Anita of Hohenberg, the eldest great-grandchild of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, shook hands with Branislav Princip, grandnephew of Gavrilo Princip, in a symbolic act of reconciliation.
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Common questions
Who was Gavrilo Princip?
Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb student, born on the 25th of July 1894, who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914. He died of tuberculosis in prison on the 28th of April 1918.
Why was Princip not executed?
He was nineteen at the time of his trial. Under Habsburg law he was twenty-seven days short of the twenty-year minimum age for execution, so he received the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison.
Did the Serbian government plan the assassination?
The source says it did not. Friedrich Wiesner reported on the 13th of July 1914 that there was no evidence tying the Serbian government to the plot. The Black Hand, a Serbian secret society, did supply weapons and training to the conspirators.
How did the assassination happen after the first attempt failed?
After a grenade thrown by Nedeljko Čabrinović failed to hit the Archduke's car, the driver was not told of a route change. He turned onto a side street where Princip stood. The car stalled while reversing, and Princip fired twice at close range.
What did Princip say motivated him?
At his trial he described himself as a Yugoslav nationalist seeking the unification of all South Slavs, free from Austria, and said Serbia had a moral duty to help that unification.
Why is Princip still controversial?
Many Serbs celebrate him as a hero who resisted foreign rule, while many Croats and Bosniaks regard him as a terrorist. Successive regimes have praised or condemned him to suit their own ideologies.
Where is Princip's pistol today?
It is part of the permanent exhibition at the Museum of Military History in Vienna, on long-term loan since 2004 from the Austrian Jesuits, who had held it along with the Archduke's blood-stained undershirt.
All sources
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