Story Highlights
- historical event: Anders was apparently quite calm. It seemed that he wanted to speak a few words about his views on death, but the executioner either ignored him or did not hear him. The execution itself went smoothly, and Anders’s head fell into the bucket.
On this day in 1910 the only guillotine execution in the history Sweden was conducted. The person guillotined was Johan Alfred Ander, a Swedish citizen convicted of robbery of an exchange agency, during which a murder was also committed. At the beginning of that year, the exchange agency “Växelkontor” in Stockholm was robbed, and the robber beat the employee so severely that she died from the injuries she sustained.
Some blood-stained bills from the exchange office were discovered in Johan Alfred Ander’s possession and that – along with the murder weapon – was enough to convict and sentence him to death. Ander never confessed to the crime, but claimed that he had received the bloody money from an unknown man. Nevertheless, his sentence was confirmed by all court instances.
On this day Anders was executed by a new guillotine that Sweden had acquired from France. The execution was carried out in Långholmen prison in Stockholm. Anders was apparently quite calm. It seemed that he wanted to speak a few words about his views on death, but the executioner either ignored him or did not hear him. The execution itself went smoothly, and Anders’s head fell into the bucket. It was the first and only execution by guillotine in Sweden since the death penalty was abolished after that.
