Four hostages were taken during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973. How did they come to sympathize with their captors?
Three people inside a bank.
Photograph from AFP / Getty

Ayear ago last August 23rd, an escaped Swedish convict walked into the main office of one of Stockholm’s largest banks, the Sveriges Kreditbank, shortly after it had opened, bent on carrying out the most ambitious exploit of a long criminal career. He was well equipped. One hand hugged a loaded submachine gun under a folded jacket. The other hand held a large canvas suitcase whose contents included reserve ammunition, plastic explosives, blasting caps, safety fuses, lengths of rope, a knife, wool socks, sunglasses, two walkie-talkies, and a transistor radio. The convict wore gloves, and another pair was in the bag; he intended to give them to an accomplice who was not yet on the scene but whose appearance he confidently expected to arrange. The convict himself was thoroughly disguised: he was got up in a pair of toy-store spectacles and a thick brown wig; his cheeks were rouged; and his reddish-brown mustache and eyebrows were dyed jet black. In the hope of being mistaken for a foreigner, he spoke English—a required language in Swedish schools—with an American accent. For two days, while the convict remained in the bank, the police tried to figure out his identity, succeeding only when his voice, during a radio broadcast, sounded familiar to a sharp-eared detective. The convict proved to be Jan-Erik Olsson, a highly intelligent thirty-two-year-old thief and safecracker, who came from the south of Sweden; his past criminal activities had taken place in that area, and provincial police knew him as an expert in the use of explosives and as someone who had not hesitated to use a gun. Olsson had been convicted in February, 1972, for grand larceny. He had achieved a certain fame that year when an elderly couple in Helsingborg surprised him in the act of ransacking their house. Startled, the husband had keeled over, whereupon the wife asked Olsson to fetch heart medicine that her husband kept in the kitchen; the robber complied, then resumed his pillaging, finally departing with considerable loot. He had served about half of his three-year sentence at the penitentiary in Kalmar, south of Stockholm, when he escaped while on furlough a couple of weeks before his arrival at the Kreditbank.

Olsson had scarcely entered the Kreditbank’s street floor when a number of customers and forty assorted employees—tellers, mail-deposit clerks, secretaries, junior officials—knew that they were to have no ordinary Thursday morning; within seconds he had whipped out his submachine gun and fired at the ceiling, sending down a shower of concrete and glass. “I thought he was an Arab terrorist,” Birgitta Lundblad, an employee of ten years’ standing, who handled bank drafts from abroad, told me later. She was a year younger than Olsson. Fair and attractive in appearance, she commuted daily from Jakobsberg, a suburb less than a half hour away, where she lived with her husband—a civil engineer—and their two daughters, aged three and one and a half. At the bank, Birgitta’s reputation was that of a diligent worker with an almost perfect attendance record. She liked the rhythm of her work and the responsibility that went with her duties; whenever she contemplated her future, she told me, it included the bank and, of course, her family. At the time of Olsson’s entrance, she recalled, she was wondering whether to investigate a sale of children’s apparel at a nearby shop during her lunch break, but that possibility passed quickly from her mind with the violent stranger’s arrival. All that mattered, it suddenly seemed to her, was his next move. Still brandishing his submachine gun, he was announcing in English, “The party has just begun”—a line, police investigators later established, that he had recently heard while seeing an American movie about a convict on the loose. Instinctively, most of his terrified audience at the Kreditbank dropped to the floor, but some secluded themselves in a small repository for securities, and others, panicked or intrepid, or both, made for the exits, rushing pell-mell into Norrmalmstorg, perhaps Stockholm’s busiest square, whose dominant feature is the Kreditbank’s own squat, massive façade, five stories high.