Emergence/y (1930s)

Abstract

‘Europe shocked, fears grave complications,’ read the headline of the New York Times the day after King Alexander I Karadordevic, the king of Yugoslavia, was slain on Oct. 9, 1934, less than an hour after he arrived at Marseilles aboard the cruiser Dubrovnik for a government visit. (The second victim of the attentate was the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, who possibly fell by the hand of the French police in the chaos that ruled the scene.) The king’s assassin, armed with a Mauser gun, had gone by many names – Černozemski, Georgiev or Vlada the Chauffeur. He had once been a hired gun for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), but at the time of the assassination he was working for the Croat revolutionary movement, the Ustaša. Černozemski was not acting alone. On the steps of the Bourse, near which the assassination took place, was another conspirator, Mijo Kralj, who was armed with a bomb which he did not throw. Two other accomplices, Pospišil and Rajić, were ready to strike in Versailles should the Marseilles attempt failed. They were all Ustaša members, and the group was supplied with weapons and instructions by an Ustaša leader, Ante Pavelić and his associate, Eugen Kvaternik. All had come to France using Hungarian passports. Černozemski was killed on the spot. Kralj, Pospišil and Rajić were sentenced to life in prison by a court in Aix-en-Provence (1936).