Jesuits reveal gun that started world war

BY DAVID V BARRETT
THE GUN that sparked the war that killed about a million British servicemen has turned up in a Jesuit house in Vienna, Austria.
Ninety years ago on Monday, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian, fired shots which fatally wounded Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire and his wife Sophie, and triggered the First World War.
Princip’s shots hit Franz Ferdinand in the neck and Sophie in the stomach during their procession in Sarajevo.
Jesuit priest Fr Anton Puntigam, who ran a children’s home in Sarajevo financed by the archduke, gave them the last rites, and was then handed the gun to look after. Fr Puntigam later gained possession of the guns and bombs of the other conspirators, the cushion cover on which the dying Archduke’s head had lain, and petals from a rose which Sophie had been wearing on her dress. He intended to set up a museum in their memory, but the turmoil of the war made it impossible.
When Fr Puntigam died in 1926, the items were offered to the archduke’s family, who declined them, and then passed into the possession of the Jesuit order in Vienna. They remained in the community house at Ignaz Sepel Platz until this year’s commemoration prompted the Jesuits to search them out and donate them to the Viennese Military History Museum.