Gavrilo Princip was 19 when he was arrested in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and of the archduke's wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. He was a Bosnian Serb from a mountain hamlet in western Bosnia, a schoolboy who had moved from Sarajevo to Belgrade, and a member of the student movement known as Young Bosnia. He was taken into custody where the killings happened, and he never left custody again.
That October the District Court of Sarajevo tried him with 24 other defendants. On October 28, 1914, it convicted him of high treason and murder and sentenced him to twenty years of severe imprisonment. The prosecution had asked for death for every adult in the dock, but the law of the empire did not allow a death sentence for anyone under 20 on the day of the crime, and Princip had been less than a month short of that birthday. Twenty years was the most the court could give him. Three of his co-defendants were executed in Sarajevo the following February. Princip was sent to the fortress town of Theresienstadt, in Bohemia, and died there on April 28, 1918, less than four years into his term.
Between the arrest and the verdict lay four months of interrogation, a slow unraveling of a conspiracy that ran from Belgrade to the farms of eastern Bosnia, and a trial held in a garrison while the first battles of the war could be heard from the courtroom.
Princip was born in 1894 in Obljaj, a remote hamlet in the hills of western Bosnia, in the valley around Livno.
In 1907, at 13, he left Obljaj for Sarajevo to study. Schooling widened a world that had been expected to stay small: in Sarajevo he met Catholic and Muslim Slavs for the first time. The Austro-Hungarian authorities singled him out as a bright boy and gave him a scholarship to a leading school in the city, and for a year he earned top marks.
Bosnia and Herzegovina had been under Austro-Hungarian occupation since 1878, and in 1908 Vienna annexed it outright. The annexation angered Princip, as did the lack of political rights for his community. He read socialist, anarchist and nationalist writers, took part in student protests and joined Young Bosnia, a movement made up mostly of Serb students that wanted to end Austro-Hungarian rule and unite Bosnia and Herzegovina with Serbia and the other South Slav peoples. In 1912 he was expelled from his high school after an anti-Austrian demonstration.
In 1912, at 18, Princip went to Belgrade, the Serbian capital, to finish his education. He tried to enlist in the Serbian army and was turned away. He also tried to join Unification or Death, the secret society known as the Black Hand, and it too turned him away. In 1914 he trained with other members of Young Bosnia in Belgrade.
By the spring of 1914 Princip and two other young Bosnians in Belgrade, Nedeljko Čabrinović and Trifko Grabež, had settled on a plan against the archduke. The plan was Princip's. In Sarajevo, Danilo Ilić, a member of Young Bosnia and Princip's closest friend, recruited three more men for the attempt, among them Vaso Čubrilović and Cvjetko Popović. On May 26, 1914, Princip left Belgrade for Bosnia. On the way into Bosnia he and Grabež were helped by a chain of local men, several of whom would later stand beside them in the dock.
The archduke and the duchess were in Sarajevo on Sunday, June 28, for an official visit to the city. The duchess had not originally been expected to take part, and she chose to go with her husband. Both died in Sarajevo that morning. Princip was seized on the spot and taken into custody, and Čabrinović was arrested the same morning. A criminal investigation against Princip began before noon that day.
The case went to the investigating judge of the District Court of Sarajevo, a Croatian lawyer in the Bosnian judicial service who had never handled anything like it. Formal questioning began on June 29 and 30, and Princip was the first man he examined.
Princip told him that the idea of striking at a leading figure of the monarchy had been with him for about two years and grew out of his nationalist convictions. He said he had come to Sarajevo from Belgrade about a month earlier and that the archduke had been his target. He said that he regretted the death of the archduke's wife. Čabrinović, questioned in turn, said he had chosen the archduke because he believed him hostile to the South Slavs and to the Serbs in particular. Each said he had been supplied in Belgrade a month before, by men in the Serbian capital, one of whom Čabrinović knew by a nickname. That nickname was the investigation's first thread back to Serbia.
For several days the thread went no further. The two young men in custody refused to say who else had been in Sarajevo that morning, or whether anyone in Serbia stood behind them, and they insisted they had acted alone. The investigating judge later complained that the police got in his way and abused their authority. He kept to the law of the day and did not try to trick the prisoners. His preferred tool, one he used again and again, was confrontation: he brought a witness face to face with an accused and drew his conclusions from what each said in front of the other. Princip and Grabež were held apart in remand, so that neither could shape his story to fit the other's.
The break came from Danilo Ilić. Held in Sarajevo, he panicked and offered the investigating judge a bargain: he would tell everything he knew in return for protection from the death penalty. The judge told him that he could not promise any such thing, but that under Austrian law a suspect who supplied evidence that helped an investigation could claim it as a mitigating circumstance. Ilić then took apart the story of a lone attempt. He told the judge that Princip and Čabrinović had been part of a larger group, that three of its members had come from Belgrade, and he named them. The judge went straight from the interrogation room to the telephone and ordered the arrest of everyone Ilić had named.
The police were also at work, and not always by the judge's methods. One Sarajevo police officer told Ilić and other detainees that the government would have several Orthodox residents of the city put to death if the prisoners did not talk. Some of them believed him, Ilić among them, and spoke about wider parts of the plot.
The names spread outward. Grabež was arrested, and so were Vaso Čubrilović and Popović, the two students Ilić had recruited in Sarajevo. Investigators then followed the route the Belgrade group had taken into Bosnia and reached the men who had passed them along the way: Veljko Čubrilović, Vaso's brother, in Priboj; Miško Jovanović in Tuzla; Jakov Milović, the peasant who had guided the travelers across the Drina and who fled to Serbia after the killings, was sent back and was arrested; and the Kerović family of Tobut, near Lopare, among them the farmer Mitar Kerović and his sons Neđo and J.K. One of the six young men who had been in Sarajevo on June 28 fled to Montenegro and was never brought before the Sarajevo court.
Čabrinović, in one of his statements, gave the investigating judge the name of a Serbian army major in Belgrade who had helped the nicknamed man obtain what the group carried, and Princip and Grabež later confirmed it. With that, the inquiry had reached the edge of the Serbian officer corps. The investigating judge's own conclusion was narrower than Vienna's. In his summary he wrote that the idea of the attempt had circulated among nationalist youth and settled on Princip, and that certain conspirator officers in Belgrade, who shared the young men's ideas, had helped them carry it out. From the evidence in hand he could find no link between the conspirators and the Serbian government.
The Foreign Ministry in Vienna sent a special commissioner to Sarajevo to see where the investigation was going. The investigating judge told him that the involvement of official Serbia was out of the question, pointing out that the young men had hidden from Serbian officials when they crossed the border. The commissioner reported in those terms from Sarajevo on July 13, 1914. Vienna did not adopt that assessment.
Ten days later, on July 23, Austria-Hungary handed Serbia a 48-hour ultimatum. Its sixth demand bore directly on the case: Serbia was to open a judicial investigation against those taking part in the plot of June 28 who were on Serbian territory, with officials delegated by Austria-Hungary taking part in the inquiries. Serbia rejected that point and one other as an infringement of its sovereignty. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia that summer, while the Sarajevo investigation was still open.
The investigating judge formally handed the file to the state prosecutor on September 19, 1914. The indictment was filed a week later, on September 26, against 25 people, some charged as the perpetrators and others as accomplices.
It charged high treason under Section 111 and the following sections of the penal code and proposed punishment under Section 112, on the ground that the killings had been meant to detach Bosnia and Herzegovina from the monarchy and join it to Serbia. Most of the accused were charged with conspiring toward high treason with official circles of the Kingdom of Serbia. The killings themselves were charged as murder, and those who had helped as accomplices to murder. The prosecution set out to show that the responsibility reached past the young men in the dock to the Serbian state, and it asked for a death sentence for every adult defendant.
The main hearing began before the District Court of Sarajevo on October 12, 1914, and ran until October 23. The court sat in the rooms of the garrison military court, inside a military compound filled with troops, under a senior judge of the higher court as presiding judge. The war formed the backdrop: the hearings coincided with an Austro-Hungarian offensive against Serbian and Montenegrin forces in eastern Bosnia, artillery fire could at times be heard in the courtroom, and newly raised battalions marched out of the compound toward the front. Wartime shortages meant that only two court stenographers were assigned to record the hearings, where two teams of three would normally have worked.
The trial was governed by the Code of Criminal Procedure for Bosnia and Herzegovina of 1891, under which shutting out the public was a ground for nullity unless the court ordered it in a reasoned decision. The room was not empty, but it was far from open. Officials, the mayor, members of the regional parliament and officers attended, and only a few official German and Austrian newspapers were allowed correspondents. Čabrinović complained from the dock about closed sessions, and the presiding judge brushed the point aside.
The defendants were brought from the cells across the barracks yard and examined one at a time. They looked thin and pale, but they were composed, and they were generally willing to confess. Asked whether he felt guilty, Čabrinović answered with one word: yes. Vaso Čubrilović, writing decades later, described the accused as calm in the dock: they admitted their own parts without blaming each other or looking for excuses, and none of them expressed regret. Princip was unrepentant before the court and answered in political terms, speaking of the poverty of the Bosnian villages he had grown up among. He, Čabrinović and Grabež told the judges they had expected the empire to break apart in a wider war. Princip and Grabež also told the court that they had pressed Veljko Čubrilović into helping them, an account that matched his own. The peasants from the Tuzla district answered plainly and did not deny what they had done.
The prosecution also read documents into the record to tie the defendants to Serbia: confidential reports on contacts in Bosnia that a Serbian military intelligence officer at Loznica had left behind when his unit withdrew, captured by the Austro-Hungarian army in August 1914, and entries from the notebook of a Serbian major killed in eastern Bosnia. When reports on Austrian agents in Serbia were read, the defendants said they knew most of the men named.
The defense contested the treason count. One defense lawyer, who represented four of the accused, among them Veljko Čubrilović and Neđo Kerović, argued that the case was one of political murder and not high treason. Bosnia and Herzegovina, he said, had not been lawfully incorporated into the monarchy, so its separation was not treason; the penal code required a concrete act, and the killing of one man could not by itself detach a province; and the indictment contradicted itself, treating the case first as murder and then as treason. He said that Veljko Čubrilović had acted under threat and should be judged as an accomplice under a lesser provision of the code, that Vaso Čubrilović had abandoned the plan, and that Neđo Kerović had carried the travelers only as far as Tuzla without any political purpose. He urged prison terms of ten to twenty years for his clients in place of death. The presiding judge interrupted him repeatedly, warned him to keep to the point, and formally reprimanded him.
The court delivered its judgment on October 28, 1914. It convicted Princip of high treason and murder and sentenced him to twenty years of severe imprisonment.
The sentence was set by his age, not by the court's view of the crime. Under the law the court applied, no one who had been under 20 on the day of the offense could be sentenced to death, and the longest prison term such a defendant could receive was twenty years. Princip had been less than a month short of his twentieth birthday. He was treated as a minor and given the maximum term the law allowed.
Five of the adult defendants were sentenced to death: Danilo Ilić, Veljko Čubrilović, Neđo Kerović, Miško Jovanović and Jakov Milović. Emperor Franz Joseph commuted two of the five sentences to prison terms, and Kerović and Milović were not executed. Milović died in 1916 at a military prison near Vienna.
Ilić, Veljko Čubrilović and Jovanović were executed in Sarajevo in February 1915.
Nedeljko Čabrinović and Trifko Grabež, like Princip under 20 on the day of the killings, were convicted of high treason and murder and each received the maximum term of twenty years. Both later died in custody. Vaso Čubrilović received sixteen years; he recalled afterward that the court added three years to a thirteen-year term because of his conduct in the dock. Cvjetko Popović was among the younger defendants spared the death penalty because of his age. Not every defendant was convicted: J.K., a son of one of the accused, was cleared because he had taken no direct part in the plot, and he was released in May 1916. Most of those sent to prison served their terms in the fortress prisons of Theresienstadt and Möllersdorf.
After the verdict Princip was taken from Sarajevo to Theresienstadt, a fortress town in northern Bohemia, now Terezín in the Czech Republic, whose Small Fortress served the Austro-Hungarian government as a military prison.
He died there of tuberculosis on April 28, 1918, three years and six months into his twenty-year term. The war went on for a few more months.
The question of who stood behind the young men in Sarajevo was the central issue of the prosecution's case and remained open after the verdict. The investigation linked the conspirators to members of the Black Hand and identified two men in Serbia, a former Bosnian Serb volunteer fighter who had supplied the group and trained Princip and Grabež in Belgrade, and a Serbian army major who was a leading figure in the society, as accomplices. Neither was ever tried at Sarajevo. The investigating judge and the commissioner from Vienna both found no proof that the Serbian government had organized the plot or known its details, and the society's exact part in the plan was never settled in court. The head of the Black Hand later said that his organization was responsible, though Princip's own aims were not the same as the society's.
1878: Austria-Hungary takes over the administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1894: Gavrilo Princip is born in Obljaj, western Bosnia.
1907: At 13 he moves to Sarajevo to study.
1908: Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1912: He is expelled from high school after an anti-Austrian demonstration and moves to Belgrade.
May 26, 1914: He leaves Belgrade for Bosnia.
June 28, 1914: The archduke and the duchess die in Sarajevo; Princip is arrested on the spot and a criminal investigation against him begins that morning.
June 29 and 30, 1914: The investigating judge of the District Court of Sarajevo begins formal questioning, starting with Princip.
July 13, 1914: A special commissioner from Vienna reports from Sarajevo that the investigation has found no involvement of the Serbian government.
July 23, 1914: Austria-Hungary delivers its ultimatum to Serbia, demanding a judicial inquiry on Serbian soil with Austro-Hungarian officials taking part.
Summer 1914: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.
September 19, 1914: The investigating judge hands the file to the state prosecutor.
September 26, 1914: The indictment is filed against 25 defendants.
October 12 to 23, 1914: Main hearing before the District Court of Sarajevo.
October 28, 1914: Princip is convicted of high treason and murder and sentenced to twenty years of severe imprisonment; five adult defendants are sentenced to death.
February 1915: Danilo Ilić, Veljko Čubrilović and Miško Jovanović are executed in Sarajevo.
1916: Jakov Milović dies in a military prison near Vienna; J.K. is released in May.
April 28, 1918: Princip dies at Theresienstadt (Terezín).