466. The Murder of Franz Ferdinand: The Conspiracy (Part 2)
2024-07-03 00:52:46
The world’s most popular history podcast, with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.therestishistory.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Here are some of our favourite episodes to get you started: WATERGATE/NIXON apple.co/3JrVl5h ALEXANDER THE GREAT apple.co/3Q4FaNk HARDCORE HISTORY'S DAN CARLIN apple.co/3vqkGa3 PUTIN & RUSSIA apple.co/3zMtLfX
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, sign up at restishistorypod.com.
That's restishistorypod.com. Support comes from the California Department of Cannabis Control. Only licensed dispensaries sell real California cannabis regulated for consumer protection. Licensed retailers can be found at real.cannabis.ca.gov.
The Austrian heir apparent has announced his intention of visiting Sarajevo early next year. Every Serb will take note of this. Serbs, seize everything you can lay hands on. Knives, rifles, bombs, dynamite. Take holy vengeance.
Death to the Habsburg dynasty. Eternal remembrance to the heroes who raised their hands against it. So that was, Dominic, the Serbian emigre newspaper.
which was published in December 1913.. And people who've listened to our first episode on the outbreak of the First World War and we're looking at the buildup to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip will already have recognized the fact that my mastery of Balkan languages and pronunciation isn't all it can be. But fortunately, master of tongues and Balkan old hand, Dominic Sandbroek is alongside me. And Dominic, this is an extraordinary story, isn't it? So in the first episode, we were looking at the life of Gavrilo Princip.
He's grown up a poor peasant. He's moved to Sarajevo. He's very bookish. He's very poor. He's very resentful of Austrian rule.
And, above all, he wants to see, well, Yugoslavia, a land of the Southern Slavs established in place of Austro-Hungarian rule. And in hope of achieving that, he has gone to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. So that's where we left the story. And people who listened to that first episode will probably remember that we are actually recording this live in Sarajevo, aren't we?
We are.
We're recording in a wonderful bar called the Tesoro, on Simi Moltenovija. So for anyone who wants to, who fancies a wonderful bar, come and check that out. And that's why we may get kind of background noise, the sound of tram. So a tram is just going past. And, Dominic, we talked in the first episode, didn't we, that Sarajevo has the first tram system in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Very exciting. First electric tram. Yeah. So that newspaper that you started with, Tom, it was actually published in Chicago. So that is a Serbian-American emigre newspaper.
Oh, so I should have done it in American accent.
You should have done it in American accent. Oh, I missed the chance there. You did it in a very aristocratic voice, I thought.
Yeah. It's a kind of the sound of Serbian liberty.
Right. Okay. Fine. So, but that actually gives you a sense of the, that's the atmosphere in which Gavrilo Princip is, kind of, it's steeped. It's the atmosphere he's hanging around him.
We ended last time with him, just sort of drifting around these cafes in Belgrade that are full of either people who fought in the Balkan Wars, that have expanded Serbian territory, or they're people like himself, students, effectively, who have come from Bosnia to what they see as the kind of nationalist motherland.
And he wasn't allowed to fight in the Balkan War, was he? Because he was too much of a weed. Too weak. So he's desperate to prove himself some other way. Yes.
And basically, a young lad in that situation, you're intellectual, you're put upon, you want to make a mark. The kind of classic thing you do is basically shoot a member of a royal family, isn't it? That's right. So we looked in the first episode, there've been loads and loads of assassinations of royal figures. Yeah.
And it's the go-to thing. I mean, it's just what you do.
It is. It's a, it's fashionable, frankly. There are lots of copycat assassinations of prime ministers of, and, as you said, kings and queens in the 1890s and 1900s. And, as we discussed last time, Princip has this model of this fellow called Bogdan Zerijic, who had tried to, and failed, to shoot the Austrian governor of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and had then turned the gun on himself. And Princip clearly wants to emulate this guy, who he thinks is his role model.
The person that he's thinking about assassinating is actually the new governor of Bosnia, who is a guy called General Oskar Potiorek. And he thinks, obviously, well, I'll succeed where Zerijic failed, and I'll shoot the governor, and that will be a tremendous blow against the Habsburg authority. But then there is this absolutely transformative meeting that, by his own account, he has in March 1914. And he's in the coffeehouse, isn't he, Tom, in Belgrade? And who does he meet?
He meets a guy called Nedeljko Cabrinovic.
So he meets his friend, as Tom so beautifully put it, Nedeljko Cabrinovic. That's right. And he is from, he's from an interesting background. His father is a coffee merchant in Sarajevo. He conforms, like his friend Gavrilo Princip, to the stereotype.
He's a high school dropout. He hasn't found a niche. He's rebelled a little bit against his family. And he has become a typesetter for the government printing works in Belgrade. So he has moved from Sarajevo to Belgrade, as Gavrilo did.
And he is, like Gavrilo, you know, he's reading poems. He's dreaming about making a name for himself, all this kind of stuff. Now, their story that they tell about this meeting in March 1914 goes like this. One day, Cabrinovic got a letter, an anonymous letter, he says, from home, from Sarajevo. And he opened it up, and it just had a newspaper clipping in it.
And the newspaper clipping was the announcement that at the end of June that year, 1914, the Austrian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would be making an official visit to Bosnia in his capacity as the Inspector General of the army to watch some military exercises and to have a tour of Sarajevo. And Cabrinovic tells the story later on. at the trial. He says, I took this clipping, and I went down to a cafe. Now, accounts differ about whether it was the Acorn Garland Cafe or a cafe called The Little Goldfish.
But anyway, one of these cafes, they all hang around him. Gavrilo Princip is there. And supposedly, he was there dancing a traditional Serbian dance.
That sounds improbable.
Right. When the dance is finished, Nadeliko comes up to him and says, how are you doing? Blah, blah, blah. Look at this. Look at this newspaper clipping.
The Archduke. Franz Ferdinand is coming to Sarajevo. Now, if you believe, the more, how shall I put it, the more excitable versions of the story, Gavrilo reads the story. He says nothing. And then he says to Cabrinovic, meet me here later this evening.
So what is amazing is that there is a kind of very heated spy thriller quality to lots of the accounts of what's going on.
Kind of Eric Ambler, isn't it?
Very, Eric Ambler. But the truth is, you don't actually need that kind of sexing up. No. I mean, this really is what's going on. Exactly.
And it is a kind of murky world of spies and espionage. And I suppose the problem with knowing what's going on in espionage stories is that the sources are covered up. Yeah. So that is a problem in working out exactly who is driving this plot right and what actually is happening.
It is, because also so many of the accounts of this depend upon what they said at the trial. And actually, at the trial, the various conspirators told contradictory stories, stories that often magnified their own role in events, or perhaps sometimes downplayed it as though they were trying to blame somebody else. But also, of course, they may not have known themselves.
Who's operating in the background.
Who is operating in the background. So if you want an example of the kind of very Gavrilo Princip-centered version of events, a brilliant book by Frederick Morton called Thunder at Twilight. And he has this very lush spy. through Eric Ambler passage. They finally do meet up in the cafe.
that evening. They go for a walk in the park. Princip spoke at last. Softly, he asked his friend whether he would help him kill the crown prince of Austria. Silence.
Cebrinovich nodded. Silence. In Princip's blue eyes gleamed the light of a distant lantern. I will find the weapons, Princip said. They shook hands.
All this. He can't possibly know this. No. So people are projecting onto the story elements of spy thrillers that they want to be there.
But there are accounts that don't kind of turn into a spy thriller. So Tim Butcher's brilliant book. Yeah. The Trigger, which we mentioned in the first episode. I mean, he very much advances the case that it is originating with Princip.
Yes. So there are a couple of possibilities here. Maybe Gavrilo Princip did come up with the idea. Maybe another of his friends did. Or maybe, actually, they are being manipulated by shadowy forces, Tom, that they don't fully understand.
And the only honest answer, actually, historians have put forward rival theories, but the only honest answer is we can never know, because there is no paper trail. It's quite probable that they didn't know themselves, or some of them didn't know themselves. Actually, the person who said the wisest thing about this was somebody you were very keen on, Sir Edward Gray, the British foreign secretary.
Yes, great fly fisherman. Yes.
He said in the 1920s, when people asked him about the origins of the First World War, he said, probably there is not and there never was any one person who knew all there was to know. So, and actually, while we were saying that, Tom, a Bosnian military officer, walked past us with perfect timing.
Looking at you a little bit suspiciously.
You're looking at us suspiciously. So we're in that world ourselves, aren't we? We are. So let's continue with Princip's own account for now, as told by Tim Butcher in The Trigger. He says, Princip was the driving force behind the plot.
He gets Cebrunovic to help him. And another friend of theirs, who's Princip's old schoolmate, who's also in Belgrade, who is a man called Trifko Grabes. And if people familiar with the rest of this history want to get a sense of Trifko Grabes, he looks uncannily like our former producer, Dom Johnson.
Who also looks uncannily, like Oswald Mosley. So that might be another way for people to visualize this guy, Trifko.
So anyway, these three guys, Dom Johnson, Princip and Cebrunovic, they're meeting up in these cafes, supposedly planning the assassination. And what they do, if you believe this story, is they get a friend to approach, a man called Milan Siganovic. So Milan Siganovic was a war veteran. He had fought in the Balkan Wars. He is a guy who's hanging around that milieu, and people know that he has connections to paramilitary groups.
So he'd fought against the Bulgarians. He works for the state railways. But people know him as a man who knows people.
He could find you a gun.
He'll find you a gun. And after a series of kind of shady cafe meetings, Siganovic says to them, you know, I will find you a gun. I'm really restraining myself from doing a kind of Balkan voice.
Good for it, Dominic. Dazzle, the listener with your mastery of Balkan accents.
I will find grenades. Right. So he finds them the gun. He finds them the grenades.
And then he leads them out of Belgrade, doesn't he? Yeah.
Up to a park. Yes.
Which I read had the brilliant name of Top Cider. Top Cider. So kind of like Strongbow or something.
Right. He takes them to Top Cider Park, which is just outside Belgrade, a kind of half sort of park, half forest. And he says, right, I'm going to train you now on how to use the grenades and how to use the pistols. Now, let's stop the narrative right there. In one of those films where the guy says, how did I get here?
Let's stop right there. Where has Milan Siganovic got these weapons from?
Well, I know.
You know this?
I do know the answer to this.
Oh, great.
So I was reading this in Christopher Clarke's The Sleepwalkers.
Yeah.
That previously, the Serbs had got their armaments from a French company. And this was an arrangement that had begun in 1906.. And previously, they had got it from the Austro-Hungarian Empire based in Prague, a company called Skoda. And my eyes lit up because we have just bought a Skoda Yeti, which is very popular for people who live on Scottish estates. They all have them.
Theo, the producer, is absolutely appalled by this revelation. Shaking his head very sadly. It's self-indulgence, isn't it, Theo? So listen, you're right. The Serbs, as part of their geopolitical rebalancing.
They're reorienting.
Had reoriented towards France and Russia, away from Austria-Hungary. But we don't need to get too deep into that. now. Siganovic gets these weapons from another man called Major Vojislav Tankusic. So Tankusic, who is in the Serbian army, has got them six bombs and four revolvers.
We know that he obtained them from a Belgrade arms dealer in December 1913.. So Tankusic is affiliated with a nationalist group called Narodna Odbrana, National Defense. This has been set up in Serbia after the Austrians had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. So people are obviously very cross about that. And they had said, let's form an organization that will fight for Bosnia to become Yugoslav, to become part of a greater Serbia.
And they had lots of supporters in towns and villages across Serbia. They had supporters in Bosnia. They trained people. They would say, we would train volunteers to be guerrillas, to be paramilitaries. But actually, Narodna Odbrana doesn't really...
It's a bit of a talking shop. It's kind of well-known. It's public, but they don't carry out any...
Is it actually a front for a much more shadowy organization?
It is. We love a shadowy organization.
Would this organization in Serbian be called the Ujetinjenje ili Smrt? With an exclamation mark. And so that's some union or death.
Do you want me to tell you how to pronounce it?
Yeah, go on.
Ujetinjenje ili Smrt.
Because you've got to raise your voice at the end of that, because there is an exclamation mark. And again, I like it because it reminds me... Eliza, my younger daughter, when she wrote her name, would always put an exclamation mark after her name.
Frankie, you're in very self-referential form in today's episode, Tom.
This is the way I'm approaching it. I have to say, I'm not familiar with this story at all.
So this organization, Union or Death, or Unification or Death, is better known by its extraordinary nickname, the Black Hand. The Black Hand. Yeah, the Black Hand is very Tintin, isn't it? It's so Tintin.
I mean, everything about this, is Tintin.
Now, I would say, the vast majority of historians who have written about this believe that actually, it is the Black Hand that came up with the plot.
Why is it called the Black Hand?
It's just a great name. And as you will see...
They just made it up, though. I mean, because I thought it was called Union or Death.
It is called Union or Death, but it becomes known as the Black Hand. And as we will see...
But why does it become known as the Black Hand?
Because it's a good name.
Right, okay.
But, as you will see, Tom, having a name like the Black Hand and having that kind of reputation is really important to this organization for political purposes.
It's kind of like sectarian masons, basically.
It is. We'll get onto that. So most historians who have written about this believe that the Black Hand are directing the whole thing and that Princip and his friends are actually useful idiots. As Thomas Ottey says in his book July Crisis, they're useful idiots, zealous but ignorant and so deniable. So Union or Death, the Black Hand, was founded in 1911..
So it's founded in between the Bosnian annexation crisis and the first Balkan War. It has seven original founding members. Most of them are people who had taken part in the conspiracy we talked about last time to murder the king and queen of Serbia. So the regicides. So these guys have done this hideous murder and are still hanging around kind of nationalist paramilitary politics.
One of them's got a breast in his briefcase.
Right, exactly.
Breast of the murdered queen.
Major Tankacic is one of them. But the most famous one, the guiding light of the organization, is the man we talked about last time, Dragutin Dimitrijevic, who is now the head of Serbian military intelligence. And he is the guy who has the nickname Apis, after the Egyptian bull god. So the Black Hand is a very aggressive Serbian nationalist group. Its goal, its explicit goal in its constitution, is the unification of Serbdom.
And they go all in on their newspaper. The Black Hand publishes a newspaper which is called Piedmont, as in Piedmont in Italy. The idea is that South Slavs should be united in a greater Serbian kingdom. They are much more Serbian nationalists, actually, than Gavrilo Principis. So they say Croats don't exist.
They're really Serbs. Bosnian Muslims should give up Islam. They are Serbs too. And you asked about the name. The reason they have a kind of nickname like that, the Black Hand, is because Apis loves nicknames.
And he believes, you know, you said it was Freemason style. He believes that they should have a reputation as shadowy, secretive, lots of rituals, lots of symbols. So they make up a ceremony where you will go into a darkened room. There will be a bloke in a hood and he will force you to swear obedience to the organization by the blood of my ancestors, on my honor and on my life. I will, until death, be faithful to the organization.
I'll make any sacrifice for it. And there's a kind of altar and there's all this stuff. And this is all kind of, it's window dressing. It's fun. It's sexy.
It's glamorous. And if you are a Gavrilo Princip type, you love all this.
So can I ask, we heard in the previous episode that these guys are all busy reading Sherlock Holmes and other kind of spy detective kind of stories. Are these influencing this? Absolutely. Is it the interface between fictional spies and real life spies?
Totally they are, Tom. Thomas Otty says in his book, it's like something from the Scarlet Pimpernel. It is exactly like something from the Scarlet Pimpernel. Not coincidentally. Which had been published a few years earlier.
So in the 1900s, there are across Europe, lots of stories of secret societies, of spies, detectives, of course, all of these things being published, and Apis and his colleagues design the organization specifically to appeal to people who've read these stories. Hence the name. Are you going to join Union or Death if you're 16?? Maybe. Are you going to join the Black Hand?
Of course you are. Very exciting, very glamorous. So it spreads very quickly. It had 2,500 members or so by 1911. But during the Balkan Wars, gets thousands and thousands more.
So the other thing, the other obvious question is, a shadowy organization called the Black Hand. I mean, it couldn't be more obvious, could it?
Yeah, but the obviousness is the point. It's in plain sight.
So he wants to seem menacing.
They want to be menacing. They would meet in cafes and Apis would be there. He would be presiding at the table and other people looking in, basically with their noses pressed to the window, like, oh my God, the Black Hand. I would love to be at the table. I would love to know what they are talking about.
And of course,
Learning their secrets.
Learning their secrets. The rituals, obviously, people find fascinating. But also the point about the Black Hand, of course, is that it claims to represent the mass of the Serbian nation. So in other words, a degree of being public facing is very important to it. Now, there is a dark, obviously, I'd say there is a dark side to the Black Hand.
Of course, there's a dark side. They have, I mean, Christopher Clarke uses the expression, a terrorist training camp. He's not wrong. They do run terrorist training camps. And they show you literally how to be a terrorist, how to assassinate somebody, how to throw a bomb, how to blow up a bridge, all of those things.
I mean, it's a bit like Al-Qaeda would, which was supposed to be a kind of shadowy underground organization, would nevertheless release videos showing their recruits, kind of crawling under barbed wire.
Of course, they did. Things like that.
I mean, basically, it's the same. I mean, you can see the line of dissent there.
It's exactly the same. I mean, it's on the IRA funerals. People would publicly turn up in balaclavas shooting guns over the grave. So a lot of terrorist groups, nationalist terrorist groups or ideological terrorist groups, have a kind of public face, and the Black Hand is one of them. So I guess the next question is, OK, so the Black Hand, if they are behind it, why would they want to do such a spectacular and dangerous operation?
Why would they want to kill Franz Ferdinand? Now, one thing to say right away is, of course, there is no paper trail. Apis used to burn his papers regularly. Of course, because he's the head of Serbian intelligence. So he's bound to do that.
We have a pretty good idea that, much as the kind of Gavrilo Princip centric version holds, the original plan was probably to kill the governor of Bosnia, General Potiorek. You know, that would make sense. It doesn't necessarily need to be traced back to Belgrade. It could have just been local people who did it. So it's deniable, right?
But it seems that in the spring of 1914, they changed their focus to the archduke. Christopher Clarke in his book, The Sleepwalkers, says he thinks he knows he's basically drawing on other authors, but he says, we think we know who the person is who first suggested it. A guy called Rade Malo Babic. Now, he worked, he kind of used to cross the border between Bosnia and Serbia.
Is this the guy who would swim in freezing rivers? And when he came up, his mustache would have icicles hanging from it. That guy.
It's exactly that guy, Tom. Again, very Tintin. So, I mean, Christopher Clarke describes him as a super agent, a man of extraordinary dedication and cunning, who knew the borderlands well.
The thing that strikes me, having done the JFK story, where we ended up very decisively coming down on the argument that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin and that there wasn't a massive conspiracy behind it. I mean, all this seems, in a way, a much more implausible conspiracy than some of the conspiracies that are told about the JFK assassination.
Except that we know that these canned.
people with icicles from their mustaches, I mean, it's all...
Yeah, it's the Balkans, Tom. They do think differently there. Well, you are the Balkan hand. I think we can be pretty sure. the vast majority of historians believe the Black Hand is an organization set up for precisely this purpose.
We can trace connections between some of these people. We know that they talk to each other. We know certainly that the weapons came from them.
OK, OK. Well, that is clenching, yeah. And I suppose also the whole thing about Princep is that he's not a lone agent.
No, he's not a lone gunman. So that makes him different from Lee Harvey Oswald of so many more recent assassins. He genuinely is part of a conspiracy. I mean, on the day, there were six people there with grenades and revolvers. So the question is, why would they go for such a potentially?
dangerous operation? Now, the first reason is Franz Josef, the emperor of Austria-Hungary, is very old. He's about 140.. He has been emperor since 1848.. He is ill in the spring of 1914..
He's got pneumonia. So it looks as though he's going to die. His heir will succeed. So assassinating the heir that spring, that summer, would be a massive blow against the Habsburg monarchy and Habsburg authority. But I think there are two other political considerations.
First of all, Apis and other people in kind of the Serbian paramilitary milieu believe that Franz Ferdinand, the archduke, is the leader of a war party in Austria-Hungary that is itching to strike at Serbia.
Which he is not, is he? It's actually the opposite.
Totally the opposite. On this, they are totally and utterly wrong, as we will see next time, Franz Ferdinand, the last thing he wants, he is the single biggest obstacle to a war with Serbia. The second thing is, they know, and on this they are quite right, that Franz Ferdinand has extensive plans for when he becomes emperor. that will involve reforming the empire and possibly setting up a South Slav kingdom within the Austro-Hungarian empire, or even moving towards a United States of Greater Austria. that will give the Slav subjects much more autonomy.
If you're a Serbian ultra-nationalist, that is a chilling prospect, because that will destroy your dreams of a greater Serbia. because all of these Slavs within the Austro-Hungarian empire, why would they want to ally with you, this kingdom of two million people, very poor, when they can actually have much more autonomy within a big common market of Austria-Hungary that is far more developed, richer, and so on and so forth. Princip at the trial said, as a future ruler, Franz Ferdinand would have prevented our union by realizing certain reforms that would have been against our interests. And I think that is absolutely crucial in why the Black Hand decided to go for this.
And so they're plotting against him, not just because he is a symbol of the Habsburg monarchy, but for specific policy reasons embodied, they think, in what his plans will be once he becomes emperor.
If the emperor is ill, there is a possibility Franz Ferdinand could be emperor within weeks, within months. So they want to get rid of him before that happens. So, once they've approved the plan, both Thomas Otti and Christopher Clarke think that at that point, maybe March 1914, that it's probably them who recruit Princip, Czabrinovic, and Grabesz, even if they don't really know they're being recruited.
They're groomers.
This is what Christopher Clarke says. He uses the word grooming. And he says, these are young men, very young men, teenagers, some of them, who are unhappy, lonely, no friends, no girlfriend, no money. And they are approached by older men who they look up to, war veterans, who approach them in these cafes and say, oh, you're a great man. I have an important mission for you, and all of this.
You can absolutely see why they would be seduced by this. Major Stankiewicz clearly decides he's going to be the person who handles the operation, but he hides behind a go-between, which is this guy, Czabrinovic. So he's the guy who gives them the weapons and takes them to the park. And now we get back, Tom, to that point in the narrative where they're in the park.
And just to a reminder that the aims of the Black Hand, which are very Serbian, and those of Princip, who is very pan-Slav, are actually different.
Yeah, it's a difference of,
I think, nuance. Of nuance. It is a difference.
But it is a genuine difference. That Princip, he doesn't really dream of a greater kingdom of Serbia. He thinks of Serbia as the Prussia in a kind of Germany. Whereas Apis and Co, I think, when they talk about a South Slav Union, they mean you either will call yourselves Serbs or you'll be second-class citizens under the Serbs. Anyway, they're in the park, Top Cider Park.
Stankiewicz shows them the bombs and the pistols. So the bombs, first of all.
I mean, they're terrifying. Reading about how you set off a bomb, I absolutely would not have wanted to do it.
We would call them grenades, but they don't look like grenades. They're kind of like, like the kind of ice packs that you put in your freezer. Yeah. So they're rectangular and they have a kind of cap on them. So you can put them in there, small enough to put inside your jacket pocket.
They've got a cap on them. To activate the bomb, you basically have to knock the cap off. To get it off, you basically knock the bomb against a lamppost or something. So the cap falls off. Then you have 12 seconds.
And Stankiewicz says, count to 10..
I mean, who would do this?
Count to 10 and then throw. So you throw with only two seconds to go. And, you know, as historians say, these are very unreliable. So it's about 12 seconds.
Yes.
So you don't want to miscalculate. And sometimes they don't explode, or sometimes they just go off in your face.
Or sometimes they might explode earlier than they're meant to.
So they've got those.
Lots of jeopardy.
And then they have 9mm Browning semi-automatic pistols. So these have been used a lot by Serbian paramilitaries in the Balkan Wars. And they practice their marksmanship in this park. And Princip, by all accounts, is the best marksman. So they practice the shooting.
All good. They did two weeks of practice. Stankiewicz says, brilliant. Now you know everything. They go back to the Goldfish Cafe to have a celebration.
Princip rather miserably drinks mineral water because, of course, he doesn't drink. Oh, and there's one more thing, Tom. They are given cyanide as well.
Of course. So that after they've committed the assassination, they can bite on it and die. And I suppose, from the point of view of the shadowy organizers, if they exist, that's the key. Because you want them out of the way.
So it works for everybody there, the cyanide. It works, as you said, if they genuinely are controlling this, it works for the Black Hand, because they kill their operatives who can't then identify them. For Princip and co., it means they fulfill the destiny that they have dreamed of, which is like the guy at Kosovo, or like the guy in 1910, assassins who had then died and sacrificed their lives for a greater ideal. That is really important to them.
Can I just ask, and you may not know the answer to this, but I know your interest in munitions. Yeah. It wasn't possible to set yourself up as a suicide bomber, to wrap yourself so tightly with explosives that you could blow yourself and, say, an archduke in a car.
Well, I mean, this thing about knocking the cap off, Tom, that would be...
You'd look like the Michelin man, first of all, with all this.
I mean, maybe you light a fuse or something.
No, no. I don't think that could be done. Not with these grenades. You'd be lurching across the street.
I'd have tried to knock the cap off all these grenades, like banging into lampposts and stuff. It would just be a shambolic figure, because once you'd knocked one off, you'd then have to...
Knock all the other ones off.
12 seconds to knock all the others off.
Yeah.
Yeah. Sorry. This is ludicrous.
It's good to have a deep dive into munitions. Definitely is. Suicide bombing.
He also gives them an envelope. I mean, this is very Eric Ambler. He gives them an envelope and he says, this envelope will get you across the border, across the River Drina, back into Bosnia. And basically, you must go to a town called Shabats in Western Serbia. When you get there on the border, you give this to a particular man in a particular place and he will get you across.
You see, you said, all of this sounds so implausible. It sounds like a thriller. I think a lot of this is being designed to impress them. Right. You know, they've read these stories, spy stories, and I think a lot of this is pretty well be flummery.
Because there's a story, Frederick Morton tells this in Thunder at Twilight. There's a story that the night before they leave, which is the 27th of May, 1914, they are summoned to a cellar at Krakicin, Natalia Street in Belgrade. And they go down, there's somebody that's standing there, robed and hooded in black, and he shows them in a room, table draped in black. On the table are a dagger, a skull, a crucifix, a revolver, and a bottle with a death's head label. And this guy in the hood says, this is the altar of the Black Hand.
You must swear the oath.
So if he's saying that, presumably they then know that they are being manipulated by the Black Hand.
You see, there are different versions. Because, of course, if Princip has come up with the idea himself, why does he need to be...
But if it's a shadowy organization that's manipulating them, but trying to keep secret itself, I don't see why it would suddenly reveal that we're the Black Hand.
Right, unless they think... There's a long way to go, right? The assassination is two months away. It's a frightening thing. First of all, it's possible.
the story is total balderdash and I'm sure lots of people listening to this will think absolute tosh. But it is possible that people thought this will steady their nerves. They will feel a sense of belonging to an exclusive club, not wanting to let anybody down. I mean, we know from Gavrilo Princip, from that fragment of essay that he wrote, that he's a very romantic person.
Well, I mean, I have to say, I do love the idea that the whole thing has basically been constructed to seem as much like a spy thriller as possible. Yeah, that's like a kind of Le Carré plot or something.
Yeah, of course it is. Exactly it is. Or Umberto Eco, the Foucault's pendulum. Basically, they've invented all these rituals to impress these boys. I think it's possible, maybe a tiny bit implausible, that they're genuinely going there and there's a hooded figure.
But possible that they might have put on some spectacle for them the night before. You know, an initiation ritual to steady their nerves.
But also what you're saying about giving them envelopes and saying you have to cross at a certain point. Yeah. Perhaps that's slightly more dramatic and difficult than it need be.
Yeah, that they're making it.
a great adventure.
An adventure for the boys. And so it is that the very next day, the 28th of May, they leave Belgrade for Bosnia. And Tom, this is getting so exciting. Yeah, we should take a break. We should take a break.
Because I really need to catch my breath here. So we'll do that. We'll catch our breath. And then, when we come back, the assassins have crossed into Bosnia.
Hello,
welcome back to. The Rest is History. Gavrilo Princip and his merry band of assassins have left Belgrade. Yeah. Perhaps sent on their way by the Black Hand, perhaps not.
But Dominic, what is certain is that there are a lot of spy story shenanigans still to come.
There are actually. So you said, when we come back, we'll have crossed into Bosnia. But actually the crossing into Bosnia is itself a huge operation. So they've got their pistols, they've got their grenades, they've got their cyanide. They go to this place called Šabac, which is a port on the river Sava.
And Čabrinović, who is Princip's friend, is very nervous and is talking excitedly and talking too much. Princip tells him off. Now, when they get to Šabac, Princip, remember, had this envelope. I mean, it's absolutely preposterous. At a particular coffeehouse terrace, the Café America, he has been told that he will find an army captain playing a particular game of cards.
An exotic game of cards.
I don't know. Who knows what that game was? It's not Snap, anyway. So this bloke is playing this game of cards. Princip gives him the envelope.
The captain, who's playing the card game, says to his fellow card players, I must go for a walk with my nephew.
How has this not been made into a film?
I know.
It's amazing.
They go for a walk for half an hour. When Princip returns, he is carrying papers that identify them as customs officers. They go and stay in a hotel. They put all their guns and grenades into the stove, which is in their room for safekeeping. Čabrinović is still very anxious, nervous, talking too much.
Supposedly, he meets some guy and he's talking so excitedly that his coat falls over to reveal that he's carrying bombs. So it's just a shambolic... Anyway, the next day, they get on the train. They're going now to a place called Koveljača, which is on the Serbian side of the river. And Čabrinović, the guy who trains them, works for the railways.
He has given them papers that are basically free tickets and also a pass. that means no one will search their luggage. They get to the river and Princip says, we must send postcards. This is so le carré, isn't it? We must send postcards to our friends and family because this will cover our tracks.
He sends a card to a cousin of his in Belgrade and he says in the card, I'm going to a monastery. I'm off to a monastery to revise for my finals.
Čabrinović, sends...
I mean, he's out of control by this point, isn't he? I mean, he's terrible.
He sends his cards to various friends he has inside the Austrian empire and making all these kind of nationalist jokes and nationalist sayings. And Princip says, you've got to get a grip. He tears up Čabrinović's cards. He takes them to the toilet, confiscates his bombs and says to him, you must go on on your own. You're going to endanger the mission.
Grabeš and I will go on separately. You have to go on alone and we will reunite across the Bosnian border. So Čabrinović goes off his own way. Now Princip and Grabeš have to cross the river. They sort of double back along the river.
They find a stretch with lots of shallows and little islets. And there, one of the islets is a kind of drinking den where people brew their own kind of brandy, plum brandy, and they sell it to peasants. So they're kind of smugglers. It's a smuggler's den. And it's there, in the bar of this sort of shabine, that they meet a guy who's like their designated courier.
This guy is going to take them across a ford into Bosnia. And this is exactly what happens. They splash across the ford. They then are trudging across fields. They are, I mean, they're quite weedy, aren't they?
Because of course Princip was told he couldn't join the army.
Well, he's got TB, hasn't he?
He's got TB. So for that reason, they start to find the grenades and the guns and their other stuff very heavy. Yeah. They start to become very miserable. They're getting bogged down in the mud of the fields.
So they commandeer a series of kind of peasants' carts and farmers to help to give them lifts and stuff. They basically hitchhike. And Princip, I mean, they're not brilliant espionage agents. because Princip says to a lot of these people, you know, we're on a secret mission. If you tell anybody about us or about the mission, he's very threatening.
Actually, he's a very unpleasant character, I think, Gavrilo Princip. Because he says to these farmers, if you tell anyone about our mission, you and your family will be destroyed. So they're kind of leaving a bit of a trail, I suppose, behind them. Anyway, nobody does say anything. So finally, they meet up with Trebrinovich.
He's got a cross separately. They then decide, oh, it's very dangerous to go on to Sarajevo on the train with the guns and with the grenades. They decide they're going to leave them with a cinema proprietor who they think can be trusted.
Sorry, where does he, where's he popped up from?
He, well, who knows?
Is he another part of the shadowy black hand?
I don't know, Tom. And that's one of the many. So, for example, all the couriers. How have they met all the couriers? Have they met the guides?
Right. The Serbian irredentist nationalist networks have thousands of members.
And, you know, there are thousands of people who have signed up to this, like National Defense Organization. So it's perfectly possible that word has gone out. There are these guys coming. Just give them a hand. You know, I mean, they did get across the border.
They did get all the way to Sarajevo. So we know that the network did exist.
But I mean, they are leaving a massive trail.
But don't forget, they're going to kill themselves.
I know they are. But even so, I mean, it's kind of obvious, isn't it, that they're coming? No one on either. the Serbian. I mean, because the black hand is, is not part of the Serbian government.
And the Serbian government is anxious, I assume, not to get fingered for. Yeah. Being, you know, the responsibility for murdering the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne. So were they picking up on what's going on at all? Do they have?
They are picking up on this. Yeah. I'll just get on to that in just one sec, Tom. So just to finish that story, they left the weapons. They said to the cinema guy, someone will come and show you a particular brand of cigarettes.
Again, a very Eric Camber detail, Stefania cigarettes. And then they get on the train and they go to Sarajevo, where they arrive on the 4th, I think it is, of June. So you're absolutely right. They have left a trail and the Serbian government does know something is afoot. So the Serbian prime minister is a man called Nikola Pasic.
And he is described universally, Tommy, as your dictionary definition of a wily old bird. Right. Now, lots of historians present Pasic as a kind of crafty old Serbian peasant. I think Max Hastings does in his book.
He's an engineer.
Yeah, that's not quite right. He had trained in Zurich in engineering. He is a very smart guy. He leads a party called the Radical Party in Serbia, which is a kind of populist party that appeals to the many, many Serbian peasants. He's a very canny, cautious politician.
He's pro-Russian. He is nationalist. He's not as nationalist as some, but he's always very keen not to be outflanked.
But he's not blackhand nationalist.
He's not blackhand nationalist. Now, historians disagree about this, but I see no reason to disagree with Christopher Clarke in his book, The Sleepwalkers. Clarke says, it is virtually certain that Pasic knew about the plan. So about the point that they arrive in Sarajevo, he probably knows that students have crossed the river, that they have guns, that they have been helped by people along the border, and they are planning something in Bosnia. And the reason we can be pretty sure that he knows this is that in the 1920s, his education minister wrote a fragment of a memoir.
And in that, he recorded that at the end of May or beginning of June, he doesn't remember, Pasic told his cabinet, there are people who are planning to go to Sarajevo to kill Franz Ferdinand. And they agreed, the cabinet agreed that they should issue instructions to their border officials to try and prevent these guys from crossing.
So these border officials, are they to be trusted by the government?
No, they're not.
Or have they been suborned by the sinister black hand?
They've been suborned. They are members of Narodna Obrana, which is the front organisation, if you like, the big public nationalist organisation, national defence. They absolutely are not to be trusted.
And so the frameworks and structures of the Serbian state are being cannibalised by this kind of irredentist, shadowy terrorist organisation. Exactly.
Ever since 1903 and the murder of the king and queen, Serbian politics has been in this kind of grey area where there is the official politics, parliamentary politics that you see, but there are also paramilitary and nationalist groups who have a very close relationship with mainstream political parties. Now we know that by mid-June, Pasic knows they have crossed the border, that they haven't been stopped, because he demands an investigation into what is going on on the border. Why are there paramilitaries controlling the border crossings? He sent a secret letter to his war minister on the 24th of June, that is, four days before the assassination, in which he said, I have learned that border officers are engaged in treasonable work because it aims at the creation of conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. And he actually says in that letter, if our allies knew what was going on, they would desert us because they would be on Austria's side.
They would say, we are behaving irresponsibly. And, what is more, Pasic also ordered an investigation into the Black Hand. So we can be pretty confident that in mainstream political circles, people are aware that something is going on. However, there are two really important constraints on Pasic. Constraint number one, there's a big political crisis in Serbia at the time, and he's very worried about a coup by the nationalists against him.
Number two, there's an election coming. If you vacate nationalist ground, you lose in Serbia. That's how it works.
Yeah. Okay. So I understand that. But, I mean, all he has to do is basically tell the Austro-Hungarian government don't send him.
This is a huge issue in the historiography.
Absolutely, it is. But I mean, this is the key issue, isn't it?
It is. I said, that the boys arrived in Sarajevo on the 4th of June. On the 5th of June, a man called Jovan Jovanovic, who was the Serbian ambassador to Austria-Hungary in Vienna, who is a nationalist, he goes to see the Austrian finance minister, who's called Count Bilinski. The Austrian finance minister is one of those ministers who's actually in charge of administering Bosnia-Herzegovina. And Jovanovic says to him, you've got these military exercises taking place in Bosnia, and Franz Ferdinand will be there.
He says, I think it's very dangerous to do this. Now, the warning he gives, he says, my worry is that a Bosnian Serb soldier in the military exercises will load his rifle, not with blanks, but with a real cartridge, and will shoot it at Franz Ferdinand. So in the circumstances, I think you should just call off these exercises completely.
But why isn't he being up front? And saying, because I mean, that's very elliptical.
It's very elliptical. Of course, Count Bilinski doesn't take it seriously. He says, I'm sure I'm fine. But why would he? Yeah.
Because it doesn't sound sourced. I mean, it sounds a speculation.
I think the argument from historians is that the Serbian government feel they have nothing to gain from a warning, because it will make the Austrians go ballistic. The Austrians will say, can't you control your own people, your own intelligence agency?
I don't think so. I think, you know, saying there's a rogue element that's coming, and our police have rumbled it.
But don't forget, the Serbians, and the Austrians do not have good relations. For them to go to them and to say, there's a rogue element within our own state, we've failed to prevent it. I think they are hoping that nothing will come of it, that it will fail.
Yeah, I suppose.
And what is more...
But they're terrified of Austro-Hungary declaring war on them if they're implicated in it. I mean, that's a massive disaster.
But also Pasic is terrified of losing. He doesn't want to lose the election. He doesn't want the nationalist networks to turn on him. What if it came out? What if the Austrians went public?
We're calling off the military exercises because we've had word from the Serbian government. Pasic would be in terrible trouble at home, domestically. What an embarrassment for him. Yeah. Now, you might well say, Tom, the other question is, even with such a vague warning, why don't the Austrians change their plans?
Well, first of all, because the warning is so vague, they're like, they're not going to change them. But secondly, they think, I think Count Belinsky thinks, the Serbian ambassador is just trying to intimidate. He wants us to call off the exercises because he wants us to look weak and divided. And we want to show how authoritative we are and how confident we are. We're not going to just call them off for nothing.
So everything goes ahead. On the 4th of June, as I said, the boys had arrived in Sarajevo. Princip moves back into the house of Mrs. Ilic, the woman with whom he had first lodged.
And the guy who wears the black tie,
so he can reflect on death. Danilo Ilic. Now, depending which version of this you read, and the only answer is, we cannot possibly know. It's possible that Princip has written to Ilic and said to him, there's a plot, I'd love you to be in on it. It's possible, actually, some historians think it was Ilic's idea, not Princip's all along.
It's also possible, probably most likely, I think, that both of them have been groomed by the network and that Ilic is part of this. Ilic has got three recruits of his own, two high school students called Popović and Čabrilović, who are Bosnian Serbs from Sarajevo, and, interestingly, a Bosnian Muslim.
Yeah, I mean, that is interesting because it broadens it out from the idea that this is a very narrowly chauvinist Serb conspiracy, even though lurking in the background, I mean, maybe that's precisely what it is.
Yes, this guy's interesting. He's called Mehmet Bazic. He's actually the son of an Ottoman landlord, and he's a sort of self-hating son of an Ottoman landlord. So he had actually given up some of his fortune to buy his Serbs out.
Has he given up Islam?
I do not know, Tom. That would be an interesting question, but I don't know.
Because isn't the plan for the Serb nationalists, the black hand and everybody, that Muslims are seen as Serbs and therefore should give up Islam and return to the bosom of the mother church?
I suspect he wouldn't be terribly keen on that idea. Because, don't forget, a lot of these boys who are involved in the organization are dreaming of a Yugoslavia rather than a sort of greater Serbia. They're all pretty much the same person, all of these boys, apart from the interesting detail about Mehmed Bazic. They don't drink. They don't have girlfriends.
They are drifters. They are losers. They are obsessed with martyrdom and sacrifice and all these kinds of things. So they're all much of a muchness. It's Ilic who goes and gets the weapons from the cinema proprietor, shows him the cigarettes, brings them back to Sarajevo, stores them bizarrely in a bag under a bed in his mother's house.
So not a very exciting Eric Ambler location. He then takes his lads out and shows them how to use the guns and all that kind of thing. So there are two cells, I suppose you might say, Tom, involved in the operation. The one group from Belgrade, the other group already in Sarajevo. They don't really mix.
So Princip and Ilic mix, but the others don't at all. They find the archduke's route from a German language paper called the Die Bosnische Post. Ilic can translate it because he can speak German. They look at the route. The plan is, we'll go into this more in our fourth episode, the archduke is going to arrive at the railway station.
He's going to drive along the river where we have been, the walk we've done, Tom. They're going to go along this very straight road by the river. It is perfect. if you're an assassin. You can just wait.
You can actually spread out along the road. So that is the plan. The day approaches. They are all nervous, but, you know, they're holding their nerve. They meet on the afternoon of the 27th of June.
It is a rainy, grey, overcast day. The mood is kind of sombre, but they meet in a wine bar and, for once, Gavrilo Princip drinks. It's the one time he was ever seen to drink wine. Of course, because he thinks he's going to be dead tomorrow. The plan is for them to kill themselves.
I mean, very like the 9-11 conspirators.
Absolutely.
Who went out and similarly drank the night before.
Exactly. As they leave, shake hands or whatever they say. We'll meet tomorrow morning. We'll meet at eight o'clock. We'll meet at the Vlynich pastry shop in town, get a pastry and then take our places along the road for the Archduke's cavalcade.
They've got their bombs. They've got their pistols. Everything is ready. And that night, Gavrilo Princip does one last thing, totally in keeping with everything he's done up to this point. He makes a last pilgrimage to the grave of Bogdan Zeric, the terrorist who had failed to kill the Bosnian governor.
The guy who had inspired him so much in 1910. The martyr in whose footsteps he hopes to follow. And he believes that tomorrow he will succeed where Zeric failed. And he himself, of course, will be dead. He will have taken his own life and he will have written his name into Serbian folklore, having proved beyond any doubt that he is not a weakling and that he is a real man.
Wow. Well, what a cliffhanger. I mean, this whole series is just a succession of cliffhangers. And of course, we will be looking at what happens on the fateful day of the 28th of June, 1914. And we'll be going through it step by step, rather like we did with the events of the Kennedy assassination.
But before that, I think that we should look at the man who is the target of this conspiracy, the victim of it, the murdery Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who actually, I have to say, I think is a much more interesting and attractive character than I'd appreciated. We'll be looking at him and the whole context in which he operates the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And you can listen to that right away if you are a member of. the Rest is History Club. And if you're not, you can sign up for it at therestishistory.com.
Brilliant stuff today, Dominic. Thanks ever so much. I hope you've enjoyed it. Bye, bye.
Bye, bye.
v1.0.0.241203-3_os