26 November 2015
The Quality of Justice
by J R Thomas
On 28th June 1914 a terrorist event occurred which really did completely change the world. As every school pupil used to know, on that day, in Sarajevo, a group of Serbian Nationalists, coordinated by a resistance movement known rather thrillingly as the Black Hand Gang, brought to culmination a careful plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to and nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The gang had with great care smuggled across the empire a number of weapons and bombs, and themselves, travelling under false names and separately so as to avoid detection by the Imperial secret police. In mid-June they arrived in Sarajevo and hid in a number of safe houses, until everything was in place, ready to blow up the Archduke during his motor procession through the streets.
Except, as the brighter pupils used to know, it all went wrong. The Archduke was in the wrong car, the assassins in the wrong places. When a bomb was finally thrown it hit the car behind the Archduke’s. The rest of the programme for the day was carried on with, but, after lunch, further confusion occurred which ended up with the Archduke’s car going down the wrong street and stopping to reverse. By coincidence, Gavrilo Princip, one of the conspirators, was returning to his lodgings and found himself next to the stationary car. He fired the shot which was heard around the world – as it was somewhat inexactly christened, there being two shots, the first of which killed Franz Ferdinand and the second his wife.
What happened then on the international stage is well known, as the European Great Powers moved rapidly into war. What is less well known is what happened to the conspirators in Sarajevo.
The six Serbians (actually five Serbians and a Bosnian) were rapidly rounded up and removed to police custody, where they were beaten and tortured. They refused to speak out or to give away any details and finally were brought in front of the Sarajevo examining magistrate, Leo Pfeffer, a lawyer, an Austrian appointment, but a Croat by birth. Like so many things in the realm of the Hapsburgs, Mr Pfeffer was not quite what one might expect. He was a liberal, of the old fashioned sort, a strong believer, of course, in the law but also in justice, fairness, and openness, and that justice must be seen to be done. He treated the first suspect brought before him, a student called Grabezh, with great respect, and told him that his political views were of no account and that he was entitled to hold them, but that he was accused of murder, and it was that that Mr Pfeffer was enquiring into.
Grabezh was so astonished by this courteous treatment that he began to confess the arrangements for the assassination; and his example was followed by the other conspirators so that within a few days Pfeffer was able to put together a complete record and picture of what had occurred, and was able to recover the remaining bombs and guns which were hidden in Sarajevo. On this basis Pfeffer held the trial, and convicted the six, and several more who had helped them, of murder, or conspiracy to commit murder.
At the conclusion of the trial Princip made a statement, which he repeated in a personal letter to the Archduke and Duchess’s three young children, that though he maintained his wish for a free Serbia, and opposed to the point of violence what the Archduke stood for, he regretted that he had deprived them of their parents, in particular their mother, and left them orphans. Extraordinarily, or perhaps we have become exceptionally cynical a hundred years later, the three children wrote back, granting him full forgiveness.
All of them were convicted, but none of them hanged – some because they were under twenty years old, and because there was doubt as to the true ages of the others. Most though died in prison within a short time, Princip, the only one whose name is commonly remembered, of tuberculosis.
One might hope that the Austrian government would have felt that Mr Pfeffer’s approach to these matters showed the true civilised nature of the great multi-faceted Empire, an example of magnanimity towards violence, restraint in the face of provocation, justice against all odds. Unfortunately, there can be little doubt that the convicted conspirators’ treatment in prison was such that it led to their early deaths, perhaps to the extent that Princip was deliberately infected with tuberculosis. Nor was Mr Pfeffer held with any honour by the empire which he had so carefully and gracefully served – he was transferred as examining magistrate to the town of Tuzla, the very town where most of the gang had originated.
But, maybe, there is on occasion reward in virtue. After the First World War ended Serbia achieved the freedom that the conspirators had so sought, and Tuzla was a part of that new independent country. There was a movement in Tuzla that Mr Pfeffer should be tried for his role in the trial and conviction of young men who were now national heroes. But he was strongly defended by the brother of one of the conspirators, and was allowed to retire as a magistrate and continued to live for the rest of his years in Tuzla.
In these times of great violence, directed at ordinary and undefended people, and retribution so quickly and broadly delivered, it is hard to imagine a world in which terrible things were done but yet the civilised niceties were maintained. Pfeffer was no supporter of Serbian nationalism, even less of violence delivered for political ends, and his careful way of administrating justice might seem almost pointless in the light of the descent into political madness and appalling battlefield slaughter which followed. But one cannot help feeling that he deserved to sleep well at night, content in his work and long retirement subsequent to those shots in Sarajevo, knowing that he had administered justice as it should be administered.
