Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, occurred on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo when they were mortally wounded by Gavrilo Princip. Princip was one of a group of six assassins (five Serbs and one Bosniak) coordinated by Danilo Ilić, a Bosnian Serb and a member of the Black Hand secret society. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's South Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia. The assassins' motives were consistent with the
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand mobilized. Russia's mobilization set off full Austro-Hungarian and German mobilizations. Soon all the Great Powers except Italy had chosen sides and gone to war. Later, referring to Franz Ferdinand's assassination, Vaso Čubrilović said: "We destroyed a beautiful world that was lost forever due to the war that followed." Various countries of the former Yugoslavia, Bosniaks and Croats largely view Gavrilo Princip as a terrorist and an ethnic Serb nationalist. The 100th anniversary of the assassination was commemorated with a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic in the Sarajevo City Hall, in an event that was organized by the European Union. Austrian