Background
Dragutin Dimitrijević was born to an artisan family in Belgrade, August 17, 1876.
Dragutin Dimitrijević was born to an artisan family in Belgrade, August 17, 1876.
He entered the Serbian Military Academy in 1892 and compiled a glittering academic record. Thus, in 1895, though only a newly commissioned lieutenant, he was assigned to the General Staff.
His schoolmates had given him the nickname Apis. Some historians claim it means "bee" and refers to the young man's constant activity, but another view connects the nickname to the ancient Egyptians' sacred bull, a symbol of strength.
The brilliant and admired officer quickly immersed himself in conspiratorial politics and assassination plots. He drafted a crude plan to murder Serbia's unpopular Austrophile King Alexander Obrenovic. It failed. But Dimitrijevic's tireless efforts led to grisly success in the military coup of 1903. Captain Dimitrijevic then spent a decade in a series of field and staff positions, broken by a term of language study in Berlin, 1906/1907. From 1910 onward, he was a popular and influential teacher at the Belgrade Military Academy. His calls for military reform and the lasting influence his role in 1903 had given him made Dimitrijevic appear to many as Serbia's invisible war minister.
Desire for military reform was only one of many interests for Dimitrijevic-Apis. He also eyed Serbian expansion: a "Greater Serbia" was to be formed by slicing away at least the Serb-inhabited southern regions of Austria-Hungary and placing them under the Karadjordjevic crown. In 1911 Apis organized the Black Hand. This tightly knit conspiratorial network was hidden from public view by being placed within a larger and open patriotic society, the Narodna Odbrana (National Defense).
Just before the First Balkan War, Apis undertook a reconnaissance mission behind the Turkish lines. This adventure into Albania set the stage for subsequent Serbian military successes. But Apis could play no role in the fighting, for while inside Albania he had contracted a serious illness that disabled him for months. In mid-1913, however, Colonel Apis was made chief of Serbian military intelligence.
In Remak's startling phrase, Dimitrijevic was by now "the foremost European expert in regicide of his time." Although his exact role in the Sarajevo assassination remains a source of controversy, Apis clearly sought to promote Serbian expansion via expedient political murders. In early years, he had targeted Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria and Austria- Hungary's Emperor Francis Joseph for assassination. The Narodna Odbrana and the Serbian military intelligence network were useful, if unconscious, allies for Apis and the Black Hand. Remak sees Apis as the author of the successful plot to kill Archduke Francis Ferdinand. In Dedijer's divergent view, young Bosnian students like Gavrilo Princip moved the plot from inception to bloody climax with only incidental help from Apis.
Other loose threads in the story include the possible complicity of the Serbian royal family and the Serbian cabinet under Premier Nikola Pasic. The weight of recent accounts Remak, Jelavich, Petrovich discounts the possibility that Apis acted in tandem with Pasic in murdering the archduke. The complicity of Russia's military attaché in Belgrade, and perhaps more weighty Russian figures in St. Petersburg, surfaces in some accounts. While access to relevant Russian and Serbian archives is closed, that line of inquiry must remain unresolved.
If Apis did plan and help implement the Sarajevo murders, the ensuing European conflagration destroyed his hopes for Serbian expansion at tolerable cost. His own career skidded downhill. The powerful colonel was removed as chief of intelligence; he served out his remaining period on active duty in the field, as a senior staff officer. With the rest of the army, he marched over the mountains to the Adriatic, rested on Corfu, and returned to action in Salonika.
In December 1916, Apis and his lieutenants were arrested by Serbian civil authorities. Charged with plotting against the Karadjordjevic dynasty and with contacting the enemy, the flamboyant colonel was tried, then executed at Salonika on June 26, 1917. The mystery surrounding the Sarajevo plot is matched by, and perhaps linked to, the mystery involving Apis' arrest and execution. In late 1916, Habsburg authorities were exploring chances for a negotiated peace; some historians hold that Apis' murder was a sop to Vienna, a precondition for an Austro-Serbian settlement. Others raise the possibility that Prince Regent Alexander silenced Apis before the colonel could tie the crown to the Sarajevo bloodshed. Perhaps the most plausible explanation finds Alexander, then on the verge of reentering Serbian territory and no longer able to find political support in tsarist Russia, determined to extirpate independent circles in the army. These, after all, had seemed to many Serbian leaders to form "a state within a state," harassing civil authority since 1903.
Quotes from others about the person
Remak has presented a useful summation of Dimitrijevic-Apis' historical role: "personal magnetism, great intelligence, and utter discretion" made him a master conspirator and a figure of lasting importance. But his single-minded concern with forming a "Greater Serbia" and his ignorance of the larger stage on which he mounted his plots led Serbia and Europe to the brink of catastrophe, and beyond.