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The treason trial by which Baron Rauch hoped to split the Serbo-Croat coalition, and which was to furnish the cause of a war with Serbia on the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, collapsed. It rested on forgeries concocted within the walls of the Austro-Hungarian legation in Belgrade where Count Forgách held forth.
Count Forgách, the arch-forger of the Austrian Legation in Belgrade, was permanent Under-secretary in the Foreign Office, and as Count Berchtold's right hand and prompter in Balkan affairs, was directly responsible for the pronounced anti-Serb tendencies which have dominated the foreign policy of the Dual Monarchy since the rise of the Balkan League.
During the Friedjung trial it was again chiefly due to Professor Masaryk's efforts that forgeries of the Vienna Foreign Office, intended to discredit the Yugoslav movement, were exposed and the responsibility for them fixed on Count Forgach, the Austro-Hungarian minister in Belgrade.
He was holding the most conciliatory language to Count Berchtold, and he informed me that the latter, as well as Count Forgach, had responded in the same spirit.
Count Forgach, the other Under-Secretary of State, had indeed been good enough to confide to me on the same day the true character of the note, and the fact of its presentation about the time we were speaking. So little had the Russian Ambassador been made aware of what was preparing that he actually left Vienna on a fortnight's leave of absence about the 20th July.
As a Magyar nobleman with intimate Jewish connections, Forgách was an invaluable link between Magyar extremist policy and Berlin on the one hand and Salonica and Constantinople on the other.
But Forgách, though publicly denounced as "Count Azev," was not allowed to fall into disgrace; on the contrary, he had become within two years of his exposure permanent Under-Secretary at the Ballplatz, and inspirer of new plots to discredit and ruin Serbia. The scandals of the Friedjung Trial led to the fall of the Governor of Croatia, but there was no change of system.
The moral responsibility for these forgeries was subsequently brought home to Count Forgách, the Minister in Belgrade, and indirectly, of course, to Count Aehrenthal himself as Foreign Minister.
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