Princip, Gavrilo

Princip, Gavrilo (1894-1918), assassin of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria and therefore immediate cause of World War I.

Born into a peasant family in the Krajina area of Bosnia, Princip attended secondary school in Sarajevo (1911-1912) where he came into contact with Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a propaganda and terrorist organization dedicated to the liberation of the Serbs and Croats of Bosnia from rule by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After 1912 Princip lived largely in Belgrade, studying spasmodically and engaging in political debates with like-minded Bosnian émigrés, some of whom had links with the Serbian terrorist organization Ujidinenje ili Smrt (“Unity or Death”), sometimes known as the Black Hand. The decision to assassinate Francis Ferdinand was entirely that of Princip and two friends, Čabrinović and Grabež, who learned, in March 1914, that the Archduke was planning to visit Bosnia in June. By early June the conspirators had acquired a supply of pistols and bombs from a Bosnian Serb resident in Belgrade, who was in turn assisted by a Serbian army major; and, with the assistance of Serbian officials, had smuggled themselves back across the frontier to await the arrival of the Archduke in Sarajevo. It was only by the merest chance that the assassination actually succeeded (see Sarajevo Incident). At his trial in October 1914, Princip—unlike his co-conspirators who all pleaded guilty to murder and treason, and said that they would not have acted if they had known that a war would result—defended his action. Princip, while regretting the death of the Archduke's wife, insisted that he was “not a criminal, because I have killed a man who has done wrong; I think I have done right”. Princip, Čabrinović and Grabež, who could not be sentenced to death because they were not yet 20 years old at the time of the crime, received the maximum sentence of 20 years' hard labour. All three were probably suffering from latent tuberculosis at the time of their imprisonment in Theresienstadt in Bohemia, where they died of the disease during World War I. In 1920 Princip was buried with great ceremony in Sarajevo.