Williams was executed on Monday night after spending 24 years on Death Row during which he wrote children's books encouraging kids to shun a life of crime. Newspaper commentators say "Arnie" chose the politically safe route of pandering to his Republican party. In doing so, he has turned his back on religious values and on Europe, where countries have abolished the death penalty.

"Arnold the Barbarian" says Berlin's Bild Zeitung tabloid in a banner front-page headline, and its commentary pulls no punches. "The man who made his fortune portraying axe-wielding warriors and terminators, the man for whom murder and killing symbolized entertainment for years, said 'No'", writes Bild. "Schwarzenegger said 'No' to the idea that bad people can become better people. 'No' to a world view that our intellect yearns for and our religion teaches us. With this 'No' Arnold Schwarzenegger has turned himself into a barbarian. Here, on this side of the silver screen."

Meanwhile, Bild commentator Franz Josef Wagner is unlikely to make it onto Schwarzenegger's Christmas card list. "I despise you", writes Wagner, addressing the governor. "Conan the Barbarian made you famous. Sadly it has remained the role of your life." Williams transformed himself in jail, wrote books for children in the ghettos and was repeatedly nominated for Nobel prizes for peace and literature, says Wagner. "It was such a man that Schwarzenegger refused to let live. Barbarians are cold-hearted, unfeeling, do bodybuilding."

Austria's Der Standard is critical, but with a little less foam at the mouth. "The governor could have chosen to grant a pardon and still adhere to Californian practice," writes the paper. "No one forces him to be so extremely harsh. Besides, Williams had made visible signs that he had turned his back on violence."

The Austrian tabloid Kurier runs a story summing up Austria's disappointment in its hero, especially intense in the Styria region and the city of Graz near where he was born. The Green party wants to strip Schwarzenegger of his honorary citizenship of Graz and to find a new name for the town's Arnold Schwarzenegger stadium, writes the paper. It quotes Wolfgang Benedek, head of the human rights body ETC, as saying: "This man is no longer a role model for Graz and Styria."

Back in Germany, Berliner Zeitung seizes on the Williams execution to condemn capital punishment per se. It cites French philosopher Albert Camus who described execution as the most premeditated of all murders with which no killing, however calculated, can be compared. Some 3,000 prisoners are "vegetating" on Death Row, some of them spending decades waiting for their final hour, writes the paper. "In the United States, torture wasn't resurrected in the prisons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it had already returned with the re-introduction of the death penalty in 1976."  

Conservative daily Die Welt says Europe shouldn't be too quick to condemn America's use of the death penalty. "Those Europeans who still bother trying to fathom how Americans feel easily overlook that victims in America have a much higher status than the rehabilitation of the criminal, which is so central to the European system of justice," writes the paper. The clerk who Williams shot in the back and the Taiwanese family he murdered are closer to Americans than Tookie's proclaimed transformation into a good citizen, the paper writes, noting that only 30 percent of Americans found his treatment unjust.