The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie von Hohenberg was the cover story of La Domenica del Corriere for the week July 5 through 12, 1914. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, said he aimed, turned away, and fired, and was not targeting the Countess. The illustrator may have positioned her standing to make sense of the two wounds: the Archduke was shot through the throat, his wife through the groin. Illustration by Alberto Beltrame.The cover story includes a picture of the deceased with their three children. A second photograph shows the new heir to the throne, Karl, holding his son, captioned "I due futuri Imperatori d'Austria" — the two future Emperors of Austria. Karl became emperor when Franz Joseph died in 1916. His son never did, as the Empire had dissolved by the time his father died.
La Domenica del Corriere5 – 12, 1914. L'assassinio a Serajevo dell'arciduca Francesco Ferdinando erede del trono d'Austria, e di sua moglie.(Disegno di A. Beltrame)The assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife.(Drawing by A. Beltrame)
"Princip, deeply grieved by the loss of his friends [Čabrinović and Grabež], and suffering, as they had, from tuberculosis in its most cruel form, died during the last year of the war, on the evening of April 28, 1918, in the hospital of Theresienstadt prison. His illness seems to have made his last years a period of physical torture. Not enough is known of the conditions of Princip's and his friends' imprisonment to pass any judgment on their jailers, or to say what might have been done to ease their final sufferings, but the evidence of three deaths in two years alone reflects little credit on the Austro-Hungarian authorities."
In proceedings that began October 12, 1914, twenty-five stood trial for involvement in the murders of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914, both shot by Gavrilo Princip. Of six would-be assassins, only one was over 20 years of age when the crime was committed, and he, Danilo Ilić, was executed. Under Austro-Hungarian law, the younger men could not be executed. Records for Princip's birth date conflicted, putting him just under or just over 20 years old on June 28: the judge ruled the evidence favoring him must take precedence. Princip, Čabrinović, who had thrown a bomb the exploded behind the royal couple, and Grabež, who had but did not throw a bomb, received the maximum sentence of 20 years. Princip had skeletal tuberculosis which led to the loss of his right arm before his death.
Sarajevo: The Story of a Political Murder by Joachim Remak, page 269, copyright © 1959 by Joachim Remak, publisher: Criterion Books, Inc., publication date: 1959
1918-04-28, 1918, April, Princip, Gavrilo Princip, Appel Quay
