Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 43. (1993) - Festschrift für Rudolf Neck zum 65. Geburtstag

WILLIAMSON, Samuel R. Jr.: Confrontation with Serbia: The Consequences of Vienna's Failure to Achieve Surprise in July 1914

Vienna’s desperate need to find conclusive evidence that linked the Belgrade government with the assassination plot is foremost among familiar explanations for the Habsburg delay. Although the police investigation in Sarajevo outlined a clear conspiracy that went back to Serbia, there was no “unambiguous” evidence that connected the plot with the Belgrade authorities. This failure prompted the dispatch on 10 July of Friedrich von Wiesner, legal counselor of the Habsburg foreign office, to Sarajevo to conduct a further examination of the evidence already amassed. This trip caused part of the delay, not helped further by Wies- ner’s inability, as reported to Vienna on 13 July, to find the incriminating information. This discovery expedition, so the argument goes, caused Vienna to delay. But this assertion remains only marginally correct. Vienna’s investigation of the plot did not, of itself, cause the delay in acting after 7 July. Ironically, as Barbara Jelavich’s recent article demonstrates, the Habsburg authorities in Vienna already had substantial evidence about the Black Hand that could have buttressed their case against the Serbian military leadership. The failure to utilize these sources would allow the Belgrade government to sidestep - neatly - the thrust of some of the ultimatum’s demands.2)

A second explanation for Vienna’s failure to act asserts that Vienna in fact never wanted to act at all. Or, put another way, that Habsburg policymakers reacted hesitantly and slowly to the events in Sarajevo. It took Berlin’s pressure to convince Emperor/King Franz Joseph and Foreign Minister Count Berchtold to act. This analysis, posited by Fritz Fischer and others, sees the German government as the dynamic factor in the July crisis. This view sees the delay as entirely unsurprising, for only continual pressure from the Germans, with scarcely veiled threats of desertion, finally galvanized the Habsburg leaders to action.3)

But the evidence for this explanation can be interpreted otherwise. Almost from the start of the crisis Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and the governing elite, save Tisza, had concluded that military action against Serbia had to be considered. On 2 July Franz Joseph told German ambassador Heinrich von Tschirschky that the situation with Serbia had become “intolerable“.4) Austria-Hungary wanted German support to address the

The Consequences of Vienna’s Failure to Achieve Surprise in July 1914

2) Cf. Bridge, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 341; Barbara Jelavich, “Documents: What the Habsburg Government Knew About the Black Hand”, The Austrian History Yearbook, 22 (1991), pp. 131-150; Friedrich Würthle, Dokumente zum Sarajevoprozess: Ein Quellenbericht, ed. Kurt Peball (Vienna, 1978).

3) E.g., Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen: Die deutsche Politik von 1911 bis 1914 (Düsseldorf, 1969), pp. 686-699.

4) See Tschirschky to Berlin, 2 July (tel.), 2 July 1914, Outbreak of the World War: German Documents Collected by Karl Kautsky [hereafter K.D.], eds. Max Montgelas and Walther Schücking (New York, 1924), nos. 9, 11.

169