Killing off the death penalty in Switzerland

Exactly 75 years after the last peacetime execution in Switzerland, swissinfo.ch looks back at the abolition, reintroduction and re-abolition of capital punishment in a country that today is pushing for an international ban.  Hans Vollenweider could consider himself unlucky. Not as unlucky as the three people he killed, admittedly, but as he was led blindfolded from his cell in Sarnen, canton Obwalden, to the guillotine at around 2am on October 18, 1940, he might have cursed Swiss bureaucracy.  Two years earlier, 54% of Swiss voters had decided to abolish the death penalty. Unfortunately for 32-year-old Vollenweider, this took four years to enter into law, on January 1, 1942.  “There are generally two reactions: some find it shocking and terrible, others make comments, even in a group, like ‘go on, put your head in there’,” Christoph Lichtin, director of the Lucerne History Museum, tells swissinfo.ch.  Lichtin is standing in front of the very guillotine and cotton ...