Franz Ferdinand Escaped a Different Assassination Attempt
On June 28, 1914, some kid shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Earlier that day, when he was first being driven from the train station in Sarajevo, Ferdinand ran into a bit of additional trouble.
It was around 10 in the morning, and someone chucked a bomb at the his car. “The Archduke pushed it off with his arm,” reported the news at the time, but in fact the bomb bounced off the roof of the convertible. Had the top been down, as it had been earlier in the ride (convertibles have enabled quite a few famous assassinations), the bomb would have killed him, maybe with his balls as ground zero in the explosion. Instead, the bomb bounced off the roof, fell to the road and detonated under the car behind him. It injured a count, a colonel and half a dozen other people.
This assassin was Nedeljko Čabrinović, a member of the same Black Hand organization as Ferdinand’s next assassin, Gavrilo Princip. In fact, at least two other assassins from this group had been stationed along the motorcade route, but neither threw their bombs, so the task fell to Čabrinović. Right after making his move, he put a cyanide pill in his mouth and jumped in the river. The pill just made him vomit, and the river was only a few inches deep, so authorities dragged him out and arrested him.
“Herr Burgermeister, it is perfectly outrageous,” said Ferdinand, when he reached the town hall. “We have come to Sarajevo on a visit and have had a bomb thrown at us.”