Seite - 103 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The July Crisis 103 cluded that : ‘There is nothing to prove or even to suppose that the Serbian government is an accessory to carrying out the assassination, or its preparation or the furnishing of weapons. On the contrary, there are reasons to regard this as altogether out of the question […]’ This part of the dispatch was frequently cited after the war as proof of how unfounded Austria’s suspicion of Serbia had been, and how maliciously it had acted. In reality, however, the situation was entirely different. After the war, the decisive passages from the telegram by Baronet von Wiesner were in fact deliberately rendered falsely or reproduced in truncated form by the new southern Slavic government. The passage mentioned came at the end of the first part of the telegram. At the beginning of the second part, he wrote that : ‘From statements made by the accused, it can hardly be contested that the decision in favour of the assassination was made in Belgrade, and was prepared […] with the involvement of Serbian state officials. The bombs originate from the Kragujevac Serbian army depot […]’ For Wiesner, the issue of the involve- ment of other Serbs in positions of authority, particularly members of the government and the high-ranking military, remained unresolved, as did the question of whether the bombs, Browning guns and ammunition had only recently been removed from the Kragujevac army depot or whether this had occurred some time previously. Wiesner left all those issues open for which he still had no irrefutable proof, while at the same time making a strong recommendation in the second part of his telegram for intensifying Austro-Hungarian demands on Serbia.223 The extent to which Serbian politicians and members of the military at the highest level were aware of the preparations for the assassination, however, really was impos- sible to prove in individual cases. The same applied to the level of knowledge held by Hartvig, the Russian ambassador in Belgrade. Such information was only partially disclosed in 1917 during the ‘Salonica trial’. In the interim, it has become possible to analyse the Serbian documents to the extent that there can be no further doubt that there was knowledge of the attack, as well as partial responsibility.224 The Serbian gov- ernment overall had no idea, however, and naturally, it had also not ordered that the assassination should be carried out. However, it has already long been proven that the Prime Minister, individual ministers and members of the military, and, above all, the head of the Serbian military intelligence service, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, had known what was happening. Not only that : in Belgrade, it was also soon known who had procured the bombs and pistols for the attack, while clearly no reason was seen to arrest the men responsible, Major Vojislav Tankosić and Milan Ciganović, let alone take action against the extreme nationalist secret organisation Narodna Odbrana (‘Na- tional Defence’). Steps such as these were only attempted after the Viennese govern- ment had presented the demands set out in its ultimatum on 23 July. In his description of the chain of events, to which he gave the suggestive title Die Spur führt nach Belgrad (‘The Trail Leads to Belgrade’), Fritz Würthle considered why at