Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin Who Sparked WWI

The gunshot that started World War I is famous, but the assassin himself is often reduced to a single day in June 1914. This episode traces the life of Gavrilo Princip, from a remote, impoverished hamlet in Austro-Hungarian-administered Bosnia to the street corner in Sarajevo where he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.We explore how grinding poverty, romantic nationalism, radical anarchist doctrine, and a deeply personal humiliation converged to forge an assassin, and how a stalled car and a miscommunicated route handed a failed plot a second, world-altering chance.A sickly childhood in which six of his siblings died in infancyHis radicalization through the secret society Young Bosnia and the propaganda of the deedBeing rejected as too small and weak by the Serbian paramilitary commander TankosicThe chaotic assassination attempt, the failed bomb, and the expired cyanide pillsHis slow death from tuberculosis in prison, weighing just 88 pounds after four years