Shalom Nagar, the executioner who hanged Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann after an Israeli court ruling, passed away on the 26th at the age of 88, as reported by Efe on Thursday based on local news.
Born in Yemen in the late 1930s, Nagar moved to Israel as an orphan in 1948, when he was only 12 years old. After serving in the Army, he joined the Israeli prison service, where he was chosen as Eichmann's personal guard during the six months he spent in Ramle prison in 1962.
Adolf Eichmann was a key figure responsible for the Nazi Holocaust and the architect of the so-called "Final Solution". He was also in charge of organizing transportation to deport Jews to extermination camps.
In 1960, he was captured in Argentina by the foreign intelligence service, Mossad, where he was living under the name Ricardo Clemente.
After his trial, which began in 1961 in Jerusalem, Eichmann was sentenced to death on 15 counts, including crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
On the night between May 31 and June 1, 1962, after the President of Israel rejected his pardon, Nagar carried out the order to execute the former Nazi officer.
"We put the rope around his head. I pulled [a lever] and he fell down," Nagar later described, as reported by the Haaretz newspaper, about the only case in which the death penalty has been carried out in Israel since the country's founding in 1948. Nagar was 26 years old at the time, and for three decades, his name remained anonymous.
Starting in 1992, when Israeli journalists revealed his name, Nagar gave various interviews, including one to a German media outlet. In them, he explained that, after the hanging, he was ordered to carry the body to an oven to be cremated and recalled how his hands were shaking.
Some time later, he admitted to suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares. After finishing his work as a prison guard, Nagar moved to the settlement of Kiryat Arba in the occupied West Bank to study the Torah.