Stockholm Syndrome is defined as “…a condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity.”
While observers would expect the victims to fear and hate the captors who imprison and threaten them, the reality is that some don’t. In this case the victim has little hope of escape and must seek to somehow survive under malevolent conditions.
Forty years after a Swedish hostage drama gave rise to the term “Stockholm Syndrome,” the phenomenon is still being used, and misused, to explain the reactions of kidnap and hostage victims and now has expanded from a condition developed in victims of kidnappings or hostage instances. to prisoners of war, political terrorism, cult members, concentration camp prisoners, slaves, and prostitutes” can also fall prey to Stockholm syndrome.
In 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson, the hostage taker was a safe-cracker who failed to return to prison after a furlough from his three-year sentence for grand larceny . He carried a jacket in his arms and suddenly pulled a loaded submachine gun and fired at the ceiling . Disguising his voice to sound like an American, he shouted in English, “The party has just begun!”
He took four employees (three women and one man) hostage during a failed bank robbery in Kreditbanken, one of the largest banks in Stockholm, Sweden.
He negotiated the release of his friend Clark Olofsson from prison who was serving time for armed robbery and acting as an accessory in the 1966 murder of a police officer ,to assist him. He also demanded more than $700,000 in Swedish and foreign currency and a getaway car. A six day standoff ensued, while inside one of the bank’s vaults the captors psychologically tortured the hostages with nooses and dynamite.
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.
Stockholm syndrome is as tragic as it is complex. Victims suffer both the physical abuse of imprisonment and the severe emotional manipulation that locks them in place.
However, the captor’s began exhibiting contradicting behavior while inside the cramped bank vault. Sometimes they even seemed to care for the captives which quickly forged a strange bond with them. 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 another captive when she couldn’t reach her family by phone and told her, “Try again; don’t give up.” “When he treated us well,” said a male hostage , “we thought of him as an emergency God.”
Olsson called up the Prime Minister Olof Palme and said he would kill the hostages, backing up his threat by grabbing one in a stranglehold; she was heard screaming as he hung up.
Olofsson then walked around in the vault singing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly“.
The drama went on. On August 26, the police drilled a hole into the main vault from the apartment above. From this hole, a widely circulated picture of the hostages with Olofsson was taken.
Olofsson fired his weapon into this hole on two occasions, and during the latter attempt he wounded a police officer in the hand and face.
Prime Minister Olof Palme received another call. This time it was Kristin Enmark who called the said she was very displeased with his attitude, asking him to let the robbers leave, while also pleading 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.”
None of the hostages sustained permanent injuries and by this time , the hostages were on a first-name basis with their captors, 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 of it. Olsson fired his weapon and threatened to kill the hostages if any gas attack was attempted. On August 28 the gas was used anyway.
Even when threatened at this point 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. After being released, none of the hostages would testify against either of their captors in court; instead they began raising money for their captor’s defense.
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 applied to similar cases. 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.”
- Keep your mind alert when you are at public places.
- Be very conscious when you are at banks or at places where there is a chance of hostage situations.
- Stop thinking too much about becoming hostages as there is a chance that you might attract those situations into your own life.
- Try not to keep oneself at the place of captor and think from their prospective.
By consciously following the above tips mentioned above, one can actually control their mind and can prevent becoming a patient of Stockholm syndrome.
The tips may sound a bit simple but when a person is kidnapped and kept as hostage then in such as adverse environment, it is very difficult for one to keep a clam mind.
Once hostages start to panic and also look for various ways to get free form the situation. This is when they start overthinking . At times they even start analyzing the situation of the captor that includes the goal of the captor and reason behind the action taken. Further, as the captor and the hostage spend more time together in isolation, the hostage can start to develop a positive emotion towards the captor. Slowly thinking too much about the captor automatically programs the mind in a way that the captor seems to become the closest person.
thank you so much, the encouragement means so much
Thanks for sharing your research. I didn’t know the details of this incident, and it is a fascinating read.