by James Longo
Following his marriage, Franz Ferdinand had been in excellent health, but recently had been diagnosed with asthma. His doctor feared Bosnia’s weather would aggravate his condition. Archduchess Zita later remembered:
The Archduke used the excuse of the great heat of Bosnia for getting out of attending the maneuvers. Normally he always prevailed with the old Emperor when deciding his travels. … But on this occasion, and over such a relatively routine trip he failed. While leaving the final decision to him, the Emperor made it clear he desired the Archduke to go. Such a wish, especially on a military matter, amounted to an order. Looking back, it is amazing that this Sarajevo trip should have been the one occasion when he did not get his way.
As an incentive for undertaking the trip, Franz Joseph did the unthinkable. He reversed his long-standing policy of excluding the Duchess of Hohenberg from joining her husband when he performed official duties. Earlier visits to Rumania, Germany, and England were considered private affairs between the royal families, but this trip would be different. The Emperor’s decision shocked everyone. His suspension of a rule he had rigidly enforced for fourteen years finally persuaded his reluctant nephew to travel to the region that had been a war zone for a thousand years. It was the first and only exception Franz Joseph ever made regarding a joint public appearance by the couple.
Accompanying her husband to Bosnia-Herzegovina allowed the Duchess, whom the Archduke considered his best nurse, to monitor his health. It also permitted her to visit charities in Sarajevo that she had sponsored for several years. He believed Sophie his good luck charm and always felt better with his wife by his side.
The trip gave Franz Ferdinand an opportunity to bring closure to the Redl scandal by finding a replacement for the Army Chief of Staff. He ordered the command structure of the maneuvers divided between three generals. Hötzendorf correctly guessed Franz Ferdinand was using his time there to search for his replacement. The General and Archduke had recently bitterly quarreled again over von Hötzendorf’s hectoring for a war against Serbia. They only spoke to each other when absolutely necessary.
All of the minutiae of the trip had been carefully planned except the security. Sarajevo’s fifty thousand residents were provided ample opportunities to see the royal visitors. Franz Joseph’s Chief of Protocol, Prince Alfred Montenuevo, published the scheduled events the Archduke and Duchess would attend separately and together. It was the first time the Hofburg Palace provided advance publicity for any trip by Franz Ferdinand. Placards were posted throughout the city announcing the route of the motorcade and urging crowds to welcome him:
Citizens! His Imperial and Royal Highness our Most Gracious Successor Archduke Franz Ferdinand will honor our city with his illustrious visit. Our deep rooted feelings of filial gratitude, devotion, fidelity, and loyalty…allow us to show our great joy at this most august visit particularly in the streets which His Highness will pass. These are: Railroad Street, Mastajbeg Street, Appel Quay, Franz Joseph street, Prince Rudolf Street.
Franz Ferdinand’s military aide Baron Margutti was incensed. He felt that publicizing “every step of the archducal pair was playing with fire… a virtual challenge to fate.” Although twenty thousand troops were available from the nearby maneuvers, none would be used to protect the couple. Bosnia’s Military Governor, Oskar Potiorek, insisted the 120-man Sarajevo police force could manage security, even though he did not have direct control over them. That responsibility rested with his longtime political rival Dr. Leon Bilanski, a Habsburg bureaucrat and friend of the Emperor whose office in Vienna was nearly eight hundred miles away from Sarajevo.
The day after the Archduke’s travel itinerary was made public, Jovan Jovanovic—Serbia’s Minister in Vienna—met with Bilanski. He bluntly warned him the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo on the 28th of June endangered his life. It was not only St. Vitas Day, a Serbian national holiday honoring the Slavic deity of war, but the 525th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. The anniversary, the darkest day in Serbian history, marked the loss of the Serbs’ independence for five centuries to the Ottoman Turks. The solitary hero to emerge from that debacle was a Serbian assassin who killed the Turkish leader of the conquering Islamic army.
Only recently had the Christian Orthodox Serbs gained independence from their Moslem rivals to the south. Now they felt increasingly threatened by their encroaching Catholic rivals to the north. Jovan Jovanovic warned the trip on the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo would be seen as a direct provocation to Serbia.
Bilanski was a busy, impatient man. He had no time to remind anyone to do their duty, including the police force responsible for guarding Franz Ferdinand. Before cavalierly dismissing the Serbian Minister and returning to his paperwork, he brusquely thanked him with the haunting words, “Let’s hope nothing happens.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
INSCRUTABLE DESTINY
“On the 28th of June 1914, a shot was fired in Sarajevo, the shot that in a single second was to shatter the world of security and creative reason in which we had been reared, where we had grown up and were at home, as if it were a hollow pot breaking into a thousand pieces.”
—STEFAN ZWEIG
“A stone had been set rolling whose course could no longer be arrested.”
—ADOLF HITLER
No one heard the bishop’s screams; not his sleeping servants, the gardeners, the cooks, nor his houseguests and mother who were visiting to celebrate his birthday. Outside his bedroom, the 119 rooms of the bishop’s palace in the Austro-Hungarian city of Grosswardien were silent and dark in the early morning hours of June 28, 1914.
Today the palace is found in Oradea, Rumania, but that night—as it had for a century and a half—it stood within the borders of central Europe’s Habsburg Empire. The screams echoed off the bedroom walls and hung in the air. Outside and across the palace’s grounds, all remained quiet. No one stirred in the nearby baroque and art nouveau houses painted pale shades of pink, green, and blue. The city’s ornate churches and synagogues, sluggish river, and Transylvania’s nearby Carpathian Mountains were silent. The tower clock in the city’s tallest building showed half past three in the morning, but only the bishop noticed the time. For those who still clung to the region’s old legends and folklore, the Devil’s hour had just passed; the hour when the thin curtain between this world and the next lifted, and mischief, or worse, was let loose in the world.
A June rain had caused all 365 palace windows—one for each day of the year—to be closed. The great house was a smaller version of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna—home of the bishop’s friend and former student Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The nightmare that caused Bishop Joseph Lanyi to wake up screaming was about the Archduke and his wife. He dreamt they were to be assassinated that morning.
Bishop Lanyi was not a superstitious man. It was 1914. Telephones, electricity, automobiles, and airplanes were continually making life better and safer. The next day he would turn forty-six years old, yet Lanyi had already been a bishop for nearly eight years. His rise in the Catholic Church, not known for youthful leadership or quick advancement, had been meteoritic. Most people, including Lanyi, could not imagine the world they had known was about to end. The supremely confident cleric was a conservative, yet thoroughly modern man, unafraid of the dark, the terrors of the night, or the future. Lanyi could not remember the last time he woke from a bad dream or cried, but the nightmare that awakened him left him shaking and in tears.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his wife, Sophie, and their young children remained close to the bishop. For many years he had been a member of their household, lived in their home, and served as their chaplain. He had baptized two of their children, celebrated the safe birth of a third, and buried their stillborn son. He had never known a happier, more loving family, or a more essential man. Bishop Lanyi believed the future of Europe depended on this prince of peace becoming Austria’s Emperor.
To him the Archduke was the indispensable man, the catalyst for E
uropean peace and unity. Now he feared for the Archduke, his family, and for all of Europe. Lanyi paced the floor, stared from his window into the darkness. He could not stop shaking. Finally, to clear his head, he sat down at his small writing desk and carefully wrote out the details of his dream:
I walked to my desk to look at the mail. A black bordered letter lay on top, sealed in black with the crest of the Archduke. I recognized the handwriting at once. I opened it and saw on the letterhead a picture in sky blue, as on a picture postcard, showing a street, a narrow alley, with Their Highnesses sitting in an automobile, a general facing them, an officer next to the driver. Crowds on both sides of the street, then two young fellows stepped out and shot Their Highnesses…
The letter in the black bordered envelope read:
Dear Dr. Lanyi,
This will inform you that today, with my wife, I fall victim to an assassination. We commend ourselves to your pious prayers and holy sacrifice, and beg you in the future to remain as lovingly and faithfully devoted to our poor children as heretofore.
Cordial greetings from your Archduke Franz—
Sarajevo—28 June 1914. Half past 3 a.m.
Lanyi had never had such a dream, not as a small boy, or as a young seminarian, and certainly not as a man. Two hours later, his servant entered the room to wake him and found the bishop on his knees silently praying the rosary. Lanyi asked to have his mother and his other houseguests join him in the chapel. He was going to offer a Mass for Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess. Afterward he told them of his dream and drew a sketch of the assassination scene, of the car entering a narrow street, of the location of the assassins, and other details. Lanyi could not stop thinking about the nightmare. He returned to his room and wrote his brother Edward, a Jesuit priest, a letter detailing the dream and attaching a drawing of what he had seen.
Nine hours after Bishop Lanyi’s scream, three hundred miles to the south, six terrorists waited for Franz Ferdinand and his wife’s open touring car. Four of them froze and silently watched as it passed. The fifth threw a bomb the Archduke deflected with his hand. It exploded behind his car, wounding twenty people. In the chaos of the assassination attempt, no one was calmer than he and his wife. After checking on the injured, Franz Ferdinand said, “I thought something like this might happen.” He then joked that the captured bomb thrower would probably be given a medal in Vienna and a government job. No one laughed.
The Sarajevo trip had been haunted by dark omens even before he and the Duchess left Konopiste. Shortly after the train carrying Wilhelm II pulled out of the station to carry him back to Berlin, the Archduke and Duchess noticed a large flock of ravens flying overhead. Ravens were an unusual sight that time of the year. A startled Franz Ferdinand rose from his seat, muttering, “Ravens are ill omens for our House!” Crown Prince Rudolph had seen them on the road to Mayerling shortly before his tragic death.
Once they bid farewell to their children at Chlumetz, the axle on the railroad car taking them to Vienna unexpectedly burned out. The Archduke responded with typical sardonic humor, “This is the way it starts. First the carriage runs hot, next an assassination attempt in Sarajevo and it probably ends with boilers exploding on the ship!” Then the electricity on the night train to Trieste burned out, forcing him to travel there by candlelight. Gloomy shadows danced throughout the darkened car, causing him to quip, “What do you say to this illumination? Like a tomb isn’t it? First my own railcar catches fire, and now the replacement doesn’t like me either.”
Following the failed assassination attempt, the bomb thrower was arrested, the injured taken to the hospital, and Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade proceeded to Sarajevo’s Moorish-style red-, yellow-, and orange-brick City Hall. The Archduke’s wife took his arm and they slowly climbed the steps to meet the welcome committee. The Duchess’s face was completely drained of color, but the Archduke’s complexion was as red as the scarlet stripe on his black pants leg. No one had apparently informed the Sarajevo officials about the bomb, the injuries, or the near assassination.
The outdoor ceremony had not been cancelled. In the warmth of the brilliant sun a waiting crowd stood within inches of the royal couple. The mayor began his speech, “Your Imperial Highness, our hearts are transported with happiness by your gracious visit…”
Franz Ferdinand’s voice exploded. “Mr. Mayor, what good are your speeches? I come to visit Sarajevo, and they throw bombs at me. It is an outrage!”
The Duchess of Hohenberg gently touched the sleeve of her husband’s jacket. After she whispered a few words to him, he took a long deep breath, then said, “All right, you can go on.”
The confused mayor did. “Our hearts are filled with joy. … All the citizens of Sarajevo are overwhelmed with happiness. … We greet your Highnesses’ most illustrious visit with utmost enthusiasm.”
When the Archduke was handed his own prepared remarks, they were splattered with the blood of his wounded aide. He calmly read the bloodstained words. At the end of his speech, he added that the friendly reception at City Hall gave proof of the loyalty of the people and their joy “over the failure of the attack.”
A sixth and final assassin waited. After leaving the City Hall reception and traveling two short blocks, the Archduke’s car turned into a narrow street named for his uncle Franz Joseph. Two shots shattered the quiet. The Duchess threw herself in front of her husband. A bullet pierced her abdomen, a second severed an artery in the Archduke’s neck. The shots would be fatal. As they bled to death, Franz Ferdinand pleaded with his wife, “Sophie, Sophie, don’t die. Live for the children.”
The doomed couple died within minutes of each other.
It was the fourteenth anniversary to the hour the heir to the Austrian throne signed the Oath of Renunciation allowing his marriage. When word of the assassination spread, bells from the city’s Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches rang mournfully as muezzins called the Islamic faithful to prayer. A jubilant accomplice of the assassins sent a five-word telegram to Serbia confirming the success of the mission. It simply read, “Excellent sale of both horses.”
Reactions to the news from Sarajevo revealed as much about the people who learned of the assassination as the deed itself. When a military aide informed Emperor Franz Joseph of the violent death of his nephew and wife, he stood in silence for several moments. Then he exclaimed, “Awful! The Almighty will not be challenged. … A higher power has restored the order which I myself could not maintain.”
Adolf Hitler recorded his own reaction to the assassination in Mein Kampf:
When news of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrived in Munich, I was at first seized with worry that the bullets may have been shot from the pistols of German students, who out of indignation at the heir apparent continuous work of Slavization, wanted to free the German people from this internal enemy. What the consequences of this would have been are easy to imagine: a new wave of persecutions which would now have been “justified” and “explained” in the eyes of the whole world. But when, soon afterward, I heard the names of the supposed assassins, and moreover read that they had been identified as Serbs, a light shudder began to run through me at this vengeance of inscrutable destiny. The greatest friend of the Slavs had fallen beneath the bullets of Slavic fanatics.
Austria’s highest-ranking soldier, Army Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf, immediately wrote his mistress. He told Virginia von Reininghaus that the assassination might mean a disastrous war. Hopefully, he added, it would distract Catholic Austria long enough to allow her to divorce her husband and marry him. His obsessive passion for his mistress and the war had become one. Hötzendorf’s happily concluded, “Thank God! I had to wait for this for eight years! Now you will not say ‘No.’ Now will you consent to my marriage proposal?”
Nearly the entire world learned about the events in Sarajevo before the three newly orphaned children. Baron Andreas von Morsey, the Archduke’s military aide, telephoned Dr. Otto Stanowsky, the
Hohenberg children’s tutor, at Chlumetz. The Czech priest was having lunch with the children when he was called to the phone and Morsey told him, “Please tell our dear children as gently as possible that the exalted personages have fallen victim to the brutal hands of a murderer.” Morsey also telephoned Henrietta Chotek, the children’s aunt in Prague, who left at once for Chlumetz.
Dr. Stanowsky’s mother had been ill. When he did not immediately return to the waiting children, they whispered that perhaps he had received bad news about her. Their chatter died down as he returned to the dining room, his face drained of color. For several long minutes he did not look at them or speak. The children knew something terrible must have happened, but Dr. Stanowsky could not find the words to tell them what he had learned. The tense meal finished in an awkward silence. Seventy years later, Princess Sophie Hohenberg told her grandson, “We went to lunch that day as children, but left the table as adults. Our childhoods were over.”
Even after the arrival of their tearful Aunt Henrietta Chotek, neither tutor nor aunt could bring themselves to tell the children the truth. They were first told their parents had been taken ill; then that they had been in an accident and needed prayers. As the hours ticked away, confusion, foreboding, and fear permeated Chlumetz. Finally, twelve-year-old Sophie burst into tears crying she knew her parents were dead. A deep rumbling moan emerged from ten-year-old Maximilian. Nine-year-old Ernst began to shake uncontrollably. The children clung to each other, but the adults could not bring themselves to tell them of their parents’ deaths.
Following a sleepless night of tears and prayers, they were finally told the next morning by Archduchess Maria-Theresa, Franz Ferdinand’s beloved stepmother, who arrived from Vienna. Later, Princess Sophie confided to her, “It is a good thing Mama died with Papa. If Papa had died and Mama lived, Mama would have lost her mind.” Germany’s Emperor Wilhelm II, who was genuinely fond of Franz Ferdinand’s children, sent them a telegram that read: