Look for the stately building featuring a pale stone facade, a sloping green roof, and a prominent dark rectangular clock dial mounted right in the middle. We started our journey at the central bank of Sveriges Riksbank, but right here at the former Kreditbanken, Swedish banking history took a bizarre and utterly surreal turn.
August 1973. A convicted criminal named Jan-Erik Olsson disappears while on a temporary authorized leave from prison, known as a furlough, and walks right into this bank with a weapon. He injures an arriving police officer in the hand and then, incredibly, orders another officer to sit in a chair and sing Lonesome Cowboy to him. The line between threat and pure absurdity blurred immediately.
Olsson took four bank employees hostage: Birgitta, Elisabeth, Kristin, and Sven. He demanded two guns, helmets, bulletproof vests, a Ford Mustang, three million Swedish kronor which is roughly twenty three million kronor in today's money, and for his friend and former cellmate Clark Olofsson to be brought to the bank. The government actually agreed to bring Olofsson in.
Take a look at the historical photo in your app. You will see a police sniper and a press photographer lying shoulder to shoulder. This was the very first crime in Sweden covered by live television, turning the standoff into a massive public spectacle.
The initial police response was a mess. Authorities misidentified the robber as a different escaped convict named Kaj Hansson and actually sent Hansson's teenage brother into the bank to reason with the gunman. Olsson immediately opened fire. The terrified teenager barely escaped with his life and later called the vault just to scream at the police, calling them absolute idiots.
Inside the cramped three point three by fourteen point four meter main vault, a strange domesticity emerged. When hostage Kristin Enmark shivered, Olsson draped his wool coat over her and gave her a bullet as a keepsake. Yet, when police drilled holes through the ceiling to lower food, Olsson tied nooses around the hostages' necks, attaching them to safe deposit boxes so they would strangle if the police dropped in tear gas.
Despite this lethal threat, the hostages remained fiercely loyal to their captors. Enmark even called Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, pleading to leave with the robbers. Palme refused, allegedly asking if she wouldn't be content to die at her post. Enmark later stated she feared the police and their violent tactics far more than the criminals.
Five days into the crisis, police finally deployed tear gas. The robbers surrendered, and the hostages walked out unharmed. But the real shock came during the aftermath. The hostages completely refused to testify against their captors, sharing a tearful embrace with them upon release. This baffling psychological alliance led criminologist and police psychiatrist Nils Bejerot to coin a brand new term: Stockholm syndrome.
Olsson was sentenced to ten years, receiving sacks of fan mail and eventually marrying one of his admirers. In a final twist, he lived in Thailand for decades, then turned himself in to Swedish police in two thousand and six for alleged financial crimes, only to be told the charges had been completely dropped.
You can ponder the wild events of this plaza anytime you like, as the square is completely open twenty four hours a day. Let's step away from this infamous square when you are ready.
