“I was involved in the great mitzvah of wiping out Amalek.”
Not many people can say that. One of the few was Shalom Nagar, the Israeli prison guard who executed Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962. Nagar, who passed away last week at the age of 88, initially was conflicted over playing the unexpected role of hangman, but he came to accept his role as a unique dispenser of justice.
Eichmann in Exile
In his position as director of Jewish Affairs for the Gestapo’s Reich Security Main Office, Eichmann organized the deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi death camps in occupied Poland. He also personally visited Auschwitz and other camps to make sure they were in good working order. In the spring of 1944, Eichmann even relocated his office to Budapest so he could personally supervise the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
After the war ended, Eichmann was among the numerous Nazi war criminals who escaped Europe with the aid of an Austrian Catholic bishop, Alois Hudal. Thousands of Nazis were smuggled to safety in Egypt and Syria; others were sent to South America. Eichmann settled in Argentina in 1950 under the name “Ricardo Klement.”
Eichmann was part of a circle of fugitive Nazis in Buenos Aires who would gather on weekends to smoke, drink, reminisce about “the good old days,” and scheme about how to rejoin German political life. For four months in 1956, a Dutch Nazi journalist, Willem Sassen, was allowed to tape record the conversations.
On the tapes, Eichmann can be heard describing himself as “a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright.” He asserted, “If of the 10.3 million Jews [we] identified, we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied, and would say, good, we have destroyed an enemy…We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people…And because this did not happen, I will say to you that those who have not yet been born will have to undergo that suffering and adversity.”
After Israeli commandos captured Eichmann in 1960 and brought him to Jerusalem to face war crimes charges, he took a very different line. His defense at his trial, which began in April 1961, was that he was only a small “cog” in the mass-murder machinery, a minor bureaucrat who was “just following orders.”
Israel and the Death Penalty
Eichmann was convicted in December 1961 and sentenced to death.
When Israel was established in 1948, it did not yet have a fully-developed legal system, so initially it enforced many of the existing laws from the British Mandate period. That included the death penalty for crimes related to national security, such as terrorism.
Soon after Israel’s creation, there were a number of incidents in which recently arrived Holocaust survivors encountered other immigrants whom they remembered as having collaborated with the Nazis. They demanded that the accused be brought to trial.
As a result of the clamor, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s government introduced legislation known as the “Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law.” It affirmed Israel’s right to prosecute such individuals for “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and —at the suggestion of Rabbi Ya’akov Gil—“crimes against the Jewish people.”
During the debate over the bill, Knesset Member Rabbi Zerach Warhaftig, representing the United Religious Front—an alliance of Agudat Yisrael, Mizrachi and related splinter groups—argued that the issues of Nazis and Jewish collaborators should not be part of the same legislation, since the latter often acted under coercion.
But the Knesset voted in August 1950 to adopt the legislation as drafted, which included a provision absolving the accused if he acted to save himself from imminent danger. It also said that the question of coercion could be considered in determining a convict’s punishment. The death penalty was mandated if there were no extenuating circumstances.
To read more, subscribe to Ami
