Shalom Nagar, reluctant hangman of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, dies aged 88

Shalom Nagar, the Israeli prison guard who by chance, and against his wishes, was selected to hang convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, died Tuesday aged 88.

Nagar, who was 26 when carrying out the sentence, remained unknown for three decades after the execution that was performed at Ramle Prison in the early hours of June 1, 1962. Israeli authorities kept quiet on details of how the death sentence was carried out, with only a brief initial announcement made on Kol Yisrael radio.

Then, in 1992, an Israeli radio station researching material for a report marking 30 years since the execution came across Nagar’s name. In the years that followed, he gave various media interviews — including to a German outlet — describing the six months he spent watching over Eichmann during his trial, and how he came to be the one who carried out the execution, the first and only death sentence ever enacted by the State of Israel.

Nagar was born in Yemen in 1936 and arrived in Israel aged 12, an orphan. He served in the IDF’s Paratroopers Brigade and later joined the Israel Prison Service, where his path would cross that of Eichman.

Eichmann, a key architect of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, went into hiding after the Second World War and was snatched from Argentina by Israeli intelligence in May 1960 to be put on trial in Jerusalem for his role in the mass murder of six million Jews. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

During his trial, he was held first in the north of the country and then at Ramle Prison, where Nagar was among 22 carefully selected prison staff watching over him who became known as “Eichmann guards.”

Nagar explained in interviews that the guards chosen for the job were handpicked to ensure none of them had a personal motive to kill the prisoner. Many prison service guards at the time still carried the numbers tattooed on their arms by Nazis during the Holocaust, and they were not even permitted to enter the floor where Eichmann was kept in a special wing of the prison. Ashkenazi guards, descended from European Jews who suffered the brunt of the Holocaust, were not allowed into the cell complex where Eichmann was held, Nagar told Mishpacha.

Eichmann was held in a cell that was part of a series of interconnecting rooms. One guard sat closely watching him, separated by bars from the prisoner, another sat in an adjoining room watching the first to make sure he didn’t attack their ward, and a commander sat in a third room watching over the other two.

Authorities were concerned that Eichmann would try to kill himself, and the guards were to prevent that “at any cost,” Nagar said, but there was also fear that someone would try to poison the prisoner.

Nagar said the food was brought in a sealed container and the duty guard watching over Eichmann would sample it first, a task Nagar himself also performed.

If the guard was still alive after two minutes, the rest of the meal was passed on to Eichmann.

Nagar also described his time with Eichmann, recalling he was polite in the few words they exchanged.

When an Israeli court convicted Eichmann and sentenced him to death, the question arose as to who would actually carry out the hanging.

While many of the guards were keen to take on the duty, Nagar said he didn’t want it. In an undated interview posted to YouTube last year, Nagar said the matter went to the minister in charge of police, who instructed prison commanders to just choose someone.

A draw was held and the lot fell on the Nagar, who was convinced to accept the job after being shown photos of atrocities committed against children during the Holocaust.

“It so appalled me that I agreed to do what needed to be done,” he told Mishpacha in a 2005 interview.

After Eichmann’s appeal against the death sentence was rejected by the Supreme Court, it was time to carry it out. Nagar, however, was on furlough. His commander went to collect Nagar, stopping alongside him as he walked with his wife in the street and bundling him into the car in a bid to maintain the secrecy of what was happening.

Nagar protested, noting that his wife might think he had been kidnapped and report the matter to police. So the car was turned around, and Nagar told his wife he was being called in due to a shortage of manpower.

At the prison, a makeshift gallow had been set up by making holes between three floors, with a noose dangling from the highest to a trapdoor in the middle floor, and a place for the body to fall at the bottom.

Eichmann, who was visited by a priest, was given a small glass of wine and then prepared for the execution. Nagar and his commander put the noose around his neck while Eichmann declined to put on an offered blindfold.

Nagar described how he looked Eichman “in the eye” and then retreated behind a screen. There he operated the release mechanism, apparently a button, and the trapdoor opened.

Eichmann was left for an hour to ensure he was dead and then guards went to retrieve the body.

Nagar was instructed to cut down the body, which he complied with though he described the “nightmarish” scene with Eichman’s face as white as chalk, eyes bulging, tongue out, and blood down his front from where the rope had chaffed his neck.

As he raised the body to release it, air remaining in the corpse’s lungs was released, causing Eichman to release a loud gasping sound, terrifying Nagar.

“I felt the Angel of Death had come to take me too,” he told Mishpacha.

The body was eventually brought down, placed on a stretcher and taken for cremation.

The disposal of the remains was replete with symbolism. A special oven was built by a concentration camp survivor, and a guard whose family was wiped out during the Holocaust lit the flame.

Nagar was further tasked with loading the body into the oven, but he struggled, his hands still shaking from the fright he had received. By that point, Nagar’s commander decided to send him home in a car accompanied by another prison officer.

Nagar, in the YouTube video, described being in such a state that he could not walk without help from the officer. For a year afterward he had nightmares, and even during the daytime he feared that Eichmann was following him.

Eichmann’s ashes were taken by boat beyond Israel’s territorial waters and scattered in the sea.

Nagar, who came from a religious family in his youth, later became secular before returning to religion to become Orthodox. After retiring from the prison service he spent his time studying Torah in a religious institute in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba.

In 2004, a German media outlet asked to interview Nagar. He insisted the filming be done in the institute, surrounded by the noise and activity of others engaged in religious study and discussion, according to a Jewish Herald report.

The German reporter asked Nagar why he’d insisted on conducting the interview in such a noisy environment. Nagar responded that he knew millions of Germans would watch the interview and he wanted to show them that the Jewish people did not just survive the Holocaust, but were thriving on the very culture, books, traditions, and language that the Germans tried to destroy, Jewish Herald said.