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
Coretti Arle Titz that she'd performed for a roomful of revolutionaries who used the concerts as fronts for their anti-government meetings. Through Burenin, Coretti was introduced to many other revolutionary actors, composers, musicians, artists and writers. From her new Bolshevik acquaintances, she became more familiar with the unrelenting fury and brutality of the Tsarist gendarmerie and Okhrana (secret police) upon the lower classes. The leaders of the proletariat were shadowed, hunted and sent to rot in distant Siberian prisons for their illegal underground activities. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, setting in motion the events