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A group of young nationalists hatched a plot to kill the archduke during his visit to Sarajevo, and after some missteps, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip was able to shoot the royal couple at point-blank range, while they traveled in their official procession, killing both almost instantly. No Death Sentence for Franz Ferdinands Killer.
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The annexation had angered Serbian nationalists, who believed the territories should be part of Serbia. With Franz Ferdinand's death, Austria had the pretext it wanted to put the smaller and weaker Serbians in their place. In order to achieve this it was decided to. The archduke traveled to Sarajevo in June 1914 to inspect the imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908. The immediate reason for Austria's ultimatum was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, Bosnia on Jby the Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. A secret terrorist organisation called the Black Hand was set up in Serbia with the aim of freeing all Slav people. READ MORE: Did Franz Ferdinand’s Assassination Cause World War I? While on their way to the hospital where the adjutant was being treated, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were shot by Gavrilo Princip, who had been trained. Franz Ferdinand’s demonstration of power in the form of a military parade thus not only ended with his own death but triggered off a war that was to cost ten million human beings their lives.Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August. On June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s death, Germany and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles, officially marking the end of World War I. The particular constellation of alliances between European states led to the outbreak of the First World War. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August. The war propaganda machine was set in motion throughout the Danube Monarchy and Serbia was given a sharp ultimatum, which it failed to comply with. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Bloodstains on Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s uniform still bear witness to the deed.Īlthough no proof could be found for the Serbian government having been party to planning the assassination, it seemed probable that this had been the case. While on their way to the hospital where the adjutant was being treated, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were shot by Gavrilo Princip, who had been trained as an assassin in Serbia. Various groups of assassins lay in wait for Franz Ferdinand, and even before noon a bomb injured the Archduke’s adjutant. Princip had been tasked, and it is believed that there were others with the same instruction, to assassinate Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the. The date, St Vitus’ Day or ‘Vidovdan’, was and is a particularly sensitive one, being the anniversary of the fateful battle of Kosovo between the Serbs and Ottomans – and thus a Serbian day of mourning. On 28 June 1914, Franz Ferdinand represented the Emperor at manoeuvres and at a parade in the Bosnian town of Sarajevo. His friendliness towards the southern Slavs caused Serbia to see him as a threat to their own expansionist plans. He was particularly concerned about the developments in the Balkans. His distinctive characteristics were his clericalist-conservative general attitudes, pronounced anti-Semitic views, and antipathy to Hungary. Two days earlier, the heir to the Austrian throne Franz Ferdinand had been shot in Sarajevo.īorn in 1863, Franz Joseph’s nephew Franz Ferdinand had come into line for the throne after Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide and became official heir after the death of his own father Karl Ludwig in 1896. Ever since that June day in Sarajevo, there has been a cloud of mystery surrounding the events that led up the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. ‘Assassination in Sarajevo – heir to the throne murdered with his wife’ ran the headlines on the title-page of the Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung of 30 June 1914.
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