Sarajevo's Elusive Assassin

Numerous untruths have persisted about Gavrilo Princip, the man who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. One of them was used by Austria-Hungary as grounds for its declaration of war against Serbia in 1914.


No other assassin, it may be argued, had a greater impact on world history than Gavrilo Princip, the gunman who triggered the First World War by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914. But I would also maintain that no other assassin has had their story so mangled in the retelling.

We have been told by historians, some of whom have published in the run-up to the war’s centenary, that: Princip jumped on the running board of the archduke’s limousine to take his shot; the archduke’s wife was pregnant when she died in the shooting; it happened on the anniversary of their marriage; the car did not have a reverse gear so was incapable of correcting the driver’s error that delivered it to the assassin; the archduke bravely caught the grenade thrown earlier at the couple and tossed it nonchalantly away; and Princip stopped to eat a last sandwich at a corner café before emerging to take his shot.

All these details, and many more published over the last century, are untrue, fanciful, frothy nonsense. Perhaps Napoleon was right when he observed that history is nothing but the lies that are no longer disputed. The most egregious mistake is the famous photograph that purports to show Princip being bundled away by the Austro-Hungarian gendarmerie moments after the attack.

http://www.historytoday.com/tim-butcher/sarajevos-elusive-assassin