Reluctant Eichmann executioner and kosher butcher Shalom Nagar dies in Israel

Shalom Nagar, the reluctant executioner of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, died on 26 November in Israel. He was in his late 80s.

In 1962, Nagar was a twenty-something prison guard when he was selected to be the hangman of the Nazi fugitive who engineered Hitler’s Final Solution.

After being captured from Argentina by Israeli agents, Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. 

It was the first and only case of capital punishment in Israel’s history, and Nagar certainly did not volunteer for the opportunity to carry out Eichmann’s sentence.

Born in Yemen in or around 1936, Nagar emigrated to Israel shortly after the Jewish State was founded, serving in the IDF as a paratrooper and later joining the prison service, where he reportedly remained for 28 years.

It was during his time as a prison guard in Ramla when, on 31 May 1962, he was picked up by his boss while on an off-duty walk with his wife Ora, driven back to the prison, and taken directly to the execution chamber where Eichmann was waiting. Eichmann had reportedly requested a glass of white wine and cigarettes before his execution and was still wearing his plaid slippers when the moment arrived, and he refused to wear a hood to cover his face.

In a 2004 interview with an Israeli news site, Nagar said that Eichmann was the only person who ever frightened him. “From a childhood age, I lived alone without parents and without help, I was not a man who got scared.

"But from him I was scared.”

When performing the execution, Nagar said he looked Eichmann in the eye, then, “I pulled the handle and he fell, dangling from the rope.”

He was left hanging for an hour before Nagar was ordered to take down the body. “For years I had nightmares of those moments,” he recalled decades later, when he finally came forward about his role in the execution in 2004. “His face was white as chalk, his eyes were bulging and his tongue was dangling out. The rope rubbed the skin off his neck, and his tongue and chest were covered in blood.”

Nagar added: “I didn’t know that when a person is strangled all the air remains in his stomach, and when I lifted him, all the air inside came up and the most horrifying sound was released from his mouth — ‘baaaaa!’ I felt the Angel of Death had come to take me, too.”

When asked in 2004, whether he had any thoughts about why he was picked for the execution, over the thousands of Jews willing, Nagar said: "In the army, they say that one doesn't ask questions. At the same time I didn't ask questions. What they told me, I did. But today I understand what I did".

Eichmann had escaped to Argentina after the war, fleeing Germany in 1950. He lived in South America for 10 years before Mossad agents discovered his whereabouts and brought him to Israel for trial in 1960, where he was sentenced to death. During the six months Eichmann spent awaiting execution in Ramla prison, Nagar was one of 22 handpicked guards tasked with monitoring the former Nazi official.

He explained that Ashkenazi Jews were not allowed to guard Eichmann in case they sought revenge for family members killed in the Holocaust or were themselves survivors.

“It was only 16 years after the Holocaust, and many prison employees had either gone through the camps or lost family,” Nagar said.

Eichmann’s meals were delivered to him in sealed containers, and Nagar was tasked with tasting the food to ensure it was not poisoned.

“If I didn’t drop dead after two minutes, the duty officer allowed the plate into his cell,” Nagar recalled. “For six months I guarded him, facing his cell in the innermost room, standing in close proximity to where he rested, wrote his memoirs, ate and used the facilities. He was extremely clean and washed his hands compulsively.”

Though Nagar was reportedly chosen in a lottery to be Eichmann’s hangman, the head prison warden considered him ideal for the task thanks to his having been a decorated soldier and also removed from the Holocaust thanks to his upbringing in Yemen.

“He took me and several other guards and showed us footage of how the Nazis took innocent children and tore them to pieces,” he continued. “I was so shaken that I agreed to whatever had to be done.”

But Nagar kept his involvement in the execution private out of fear of reprisal from neo-Nazis until 2004, when he decided to share his story. He was also the subject of a documentary called The Hangman.

After leaving his service in the Israeli Prisons Authority, Nagar trained in Shechita and lived in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, embracing a strictly orthodox way of life, performing ritual Kosher slaughter.