On the morning of June 17, 1939, a crowd gathered outside the doors of the Saint-Pierre prison, in the center of Versailles. They had come to watch the execution of Eugen Weidmann, a serial killer who had been embarrassed of multiple kidnappings and murders.
The first spectators began arriving shortly after midnight. Because executions usually took place before sunrise, being early afforded spectators front-row seats and better visibility of the action. By the time the first rays of the sun broke out across the still dark sky, the crowd had swelled to six hundred people. The mood was boisterous.
“There were catcalls and jests with the Mobile Guards and occasionally a wave of cheering and whistling,” reported the International Herald Tribune. “In two brightly lit cafes waiters joked and perspired and piles of sausage sandwiches, prepared in advance, went steadily down.”
A little after 4 a.m., Weidmann emerged from the prison, his eyes tightly shut, his face flushed and his cheeks sunken. His hands were tied behind his back. “His thin blue shirt had been cut away across his chest, and his shoulders appeared startlingly white against the dark polished wood of the machine upon which he was pushed,” wrote the International Herald Tribune.
Ten seconds later, he was dead.
Among those watching was actor Christopher Lee, who would later gain recognition playing the role of Dracula. Lee was then 17. He was attending with a friend of his family who was a journalist. In his autobiography, he described the “powerful wave of howling and shrieking” that greeted Weidmann’s appearance on the street.
Lee said he could not bring himself to watch Weidmann’s execution. "I turned my head, but I heard," he told a documentary in 1998.