by Tucker Koch, Contributing Writer
We’re back in WW1 again! This time, we’re going to explore the event that ignited the entire conflict. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I know, you probably heard an abridged version of this story from your history class, but I promise you there are some intriguing things here.
So in 1908, Austria-Hungary directly annexed the Ottoman puppet state of Bosnia, which the Austro-Hungarians had de facto control over since 1878. This sparked a mild insurgency group to rise up in Bosnia (Young Bosnia) as well as a terrorist group known as ‘Black Hand’.
This terrorist group that sounds like a 1990’s metal band was a bunch of Serbian officers getting together to make Greater Serbia through force. AKA, it’s the Balkans, and they needed an excuse to kill each other. In response to the growing instability, the leader of Austria-Hungary, Emperor Franz Joseph, sent Franz Ferdinand to conduct military exercises in Bosnia to demonstrate Austria-Hungary’s dominance in the region.
However, since they were in Bosnia, Ferdinand thought it might be fun to attend the opening of the state museum in Sarajevo. His wife, Sophie, was, reasonably, terrified for his safety, so she tagged along as well to make sure he wouldn’t do anything stupid. On June 28, 1914, on Ferdinand’s wedding anniversary, he decided to do a grand parade from Ilidža to Sarajevo to celebrate their marriage. The Austro-Hungarian military wanted to send troops to protect him during his parade, as the region was still unstable, but he refused, thinking it would offend the locals. He left it to the 60 active local police officers to protect him. Black Hand knew of this parade and wanted to use it as a political stunt to further their efforts. As such, at around 10 am that day, a bomb was thrown directly at Franz Ferdinand. Unfortunately for the assailant, the bomb bounced off of Ferdinand’s car and, in what I can only describe as Looney Tunes logic, popped over to the car behind them, causing that car to explode. The assailant, realizing he failed at his job, took a cyanide pill and jumped into the nearby river. Despite trying to end his life in two different ways, he survived both of these and was later arrested, as the splash barely grazed him and the cyanide had expired (for those unaware, old cyanide only causes extreme vomiting).
The parade quickly fled to the town hall down the road to regroup, leaving the bombed car behind. Ferdinand, being a bit stressed at the time, responded with a quote I just find funny for some reason: “Mr. Mayor, I came here for a visit, and I am greeted with bombs.” They decided to cancel the parade and instead go back to the bombed car and ride with the wounded to the local hospital. This is a sweet gesture; however, he is going back to the exact crossing where he almost got blown up about half an hour earlier. The assailant group, unsatisfied that Ferdinand was still alive, prepared a second ambush for him. One of them would stand on the roof of a food mart with a pistol and would snipe the archduke on his return trip. When Ferdinand reached the building, they had to stop because they had somehow taken a wrong turn. When the driver tried to turn around, the car stalled. At that moment, the assassin decided to descend from the building’s roof, reach the car’s footboard without any opposition, and take a close-range shot at the archduke and his wife. Reportedly speaking by several sources, Franz Ferdinand’s last words were “Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!” followed by several utterances of the phrase “It is nothing.” After killing both of them, the assailant turned the gunbarrel on himself and tried to fire, but was quickly apprehended before he could pull the trigger.
Surprisingly, while a good chunk of the conspirators got capital punishment, the one who actually tried to kill Ferdinand and the one who succeeded only got 20 years of jail time. Most history books gloss over this section because they have so much else to cover, but I felt like laying out the full story in a more interesting way to show that even the events history books love to cover still have weird and interesting things behind them. With that all being said, my name is Tucker Koch, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this.
