The Guy Who Started the War Lived Until Its Last Year
Gavrilo Princep’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand set in motion the chain of events leading to the outbreak of World War I. Considering the gravity of his deed, it might be assumed that Princep was immediately gunned down by the Archduke’s security, or that he was executed soon thereafter. Instead, Princep was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 20 years’ incarceration, dying in prison of illness in the war’s final year.
Gavrilo Princep (1894 – 1918) was a Serb born and raised in Bosnia-Herzegovina, then a territory ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a teenager, he was radicalized by Serbian nationalists who called for a country unifying all southern Slavs (“Yugoslavia”), and joined an organization dedicated to freeing all Slavs from Austria-Hungary’s control.
Violent activism got him expelled from school in 1912 – he put on brass knuckles, and threatened fellow students who were lukewarm about joining him in a demonstration against Austria-Hungary. After the expulsion, he walked 170 miles to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, joined guerrillas who raided across the border into Austro-Hungarian territory, and was soon recruited by Black Hand terrorists.
The Black Hand trained, armed, and equipped Princep and a team of fellow terrorists, and sent them to assassinate Austria’s Archduke in June of 1914. Princep fired the fatal shots, then swallowed a cyanide pill immediately after. However, it had expired, and he was captured. In his subsequent trial, he declared: “I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria“.
He was convicted, but he was only nineteen years old at the time – twenty seven days short of the twenty year old minimum age under Austro-Hungarian law for the death penalty. So he received the maximum sentence of 20 years’ imprisonment. He contracted tuberculosis in prison, and died of consumption on April 28th, 1918, three years and ten months after sparking the war.