History
Christopher Klein
Forty years ago, a six-day hostage drama inside a Stockholm
bank grabbed worldwide headlines, and the surprising behavior exhibited by the
four hostages toward their captors gave birth to a psychological phenomenon
known as "Stockholm Syndrome."
August 23, 2013
On the morning of August 23, 1973, an escaped convict crossed
the streets of Sweden’s capital city and entered a bustling bank, the Sveriges
Kreditbanken, on Stockholm’s upscale Norrmalmstorg square. From underneath the
folded jacket he carried in his arms, Jan-Erik Olsson pulled a loaded
submachine gun, fired at the ceiling and, disguising his voice to sound like an
American, cried out in English, “The party has just begun!”
After wounding a policeman who had responded to a silent
alarm, the robber took four bank employees hostage. Olsson, a safe-cracker who
failed to return to prison after a furlough from his three-year sentence for
grand larceny, demanded more than $700,000 in Swedish and foreign currency, a
getaway car and the release of Clark Olofsson, who was serving time for armed
robbery and acting as an accessory in the 1966 murder of a police officer.
Within hours, the police delivered Olsson’s fellow convict, the ransom and even
a blue Ford Mustang with a full tank of gas. However, authorities refused the
robber’s demand to leave with the hostages in tow to ensure safe passage.
The unfolding drama captured headlines around the world and
played out on television screens across Sweden. The public flooded police
headquarters with suggestions for ending the standoff that ranged from a
concert of religious tunes by a Salvation Army band to sending in a swarm of
angry bees to sting the perpetrators into submission.
Holed up inside a cramped bank vault, the captives quickly
forged a strange bond with their abductors. Olsson draped a wool jacket over
the shoulders of hostage Kristin Enmark when she began to shiver, soothed her
when she had a bad dream and gave her a bullet from his gun as a keepsake. The
gunman consoled captive Birgitta Lundblad when she couldn’t reach her family by
phone and told her, “Try again; don’t give up.” When hostage Elisabeth Oldgren
complained of claustrophobia, he allowed her to walk outside the vault attached
to a 30-foot rope, and Oldgren told the New Yorker a year later that although
leashed, “I remember thinking he was very kind to allow me to leave the vault.”
Olsson’s benevolent acts curried the sympathy of his hostages. “When he treated
us well,” said lone male hostage Sven Safstrom, “we could think of him as an
emergency God.”
By the second day, the hostages were on a first-name basis
with their captors, and they started to fear the police more than their
abductors. When the police commissioner was allowed inside to inspect the
hostages’ health, he noticed that the captives appeared hostile to him but
relaxed and jovial with the gunmen. The police chief told the press that he
doubted the gunmen would harm the hostages because they had developed a “rather
relaxed relationship.”
Enmark even phoned Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, already
preoccupied with looming national elections and a deathbed vigil for the
country’s revered 90-year-old King Gustaf VI Adolf, and pleaded with him to let
the robbers take her with them in the escape car. “I fully trust Clark and the
robber,” she assured Palme. “I am not desperate. They haven’t done a thing to
us. On the contrary, they have been very nice. But, you know, Olof, what I am
scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die.”
Even when threatened with physical harm, the hostages still
saw compassion in their abductors. After Olsson threatened to shoot Safstrom in
the leg to shake up the police, the hostage recounted to the New Yorker, “How
kind I thought he was for saying it was just my leg he would shoot.” Enmark tried
to convince her fellow hostage to take the bullet: “But Sven, it’s just in the
leg.”
Ultimately, the convicts did no physical harm to the hostages,
and on the night of August 28, after more than 130 hours, the police pumped
teargas into the vault, and the perpetrators quickly surrendered. The police
called for the hostages to come out first, but the four captives, protecting
their abductors to the very end, refused. Enmark yelled, “No, Jan and Clark go
first—you’ll gun them down if we do!” In the doorway of the vault, the convicts
and hostages embraced, kissed and shook hands. As the police seized the gunmen,
two female hostages cried, “Don’t hurt them—they didn’t harm us.” While Enmark
was wheeled away in a stretcher, she shouted to the handcuffed Olofsson,
“Clark, I will see you again.”
The hostages’ seemingly irrational attachment to their captors
perplexed the public and the police, who even investigated whether Enmark had
plotted the robbery with Olofsson. The captives were confused, too. The day
following her release, Oldgren asked a psychiatrist, “Is there something wrong
with me? Why don’t I hate them?” Psychiatrists compared the behavior to the
wartime shellshock exhibited by soldiers and explained that the hostages became
emotionally indebted to their abductors, and not the police, for being spared
death. Within months of the siege, psychiatrists dubbed the strange phenomenon
“Stockholm Syndrome,” which became part of the popular lexicon in 1974 when it
was used as a defense for the kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, who
assisted her radical Symbionese Liberation Army captors in a series of bank
robberies. Even after Olofsson and Olsson returned to prison, the hostages made
jailhouse visits to their former captors. An appeals court overturned Olofsson’s
conviction, but Olsson spent years behind bars before being released in 1980.
Once freed, he married one of the many women who sent him admiring letters
while incarcerated, moved to Thailand and in 2009 released his autobiography,
entitled “Stockholm Syndrome.”
