Caption: Heinrich Andergassen during his trial in Naples on 15 January 1946. The defendant listens to his interpreter. Black-and-white photograph. Source: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, online: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Andergassen#/media/Datei:Andergassen.jpg (accessed 12 August 2026).

The biography of Gestapo officer Heinrich Andergassen is one of those cases from the Nazi era that appears contradictory at first glance — and precisely for that reason requires particularly close scrutiny. While the historical source material clearly identifies him as a functionary of the National Socialist apparatus of repression, numerous testimonies also exist that describe him as an “accommodating,” “helpful,” or even “decent” official. This discrepancy is not a marginal phenomenon; it lies at the very heart of the historical assessment of his character.

AI-generated historical reconstruction illustrating the creation of the exoneration statements for Heinrich Andergassen in May 1945. The image is symbolic and does not depict a specifically documented historical event.

The relationship with Anton Haller is among the most striking, and at the same time most disturbing, aspects of Heinrich Andergassen's story. Over an extended period Haller maintained contact with him, sought his company — and trusted him to such a degree that he recommended people from his own circle to him.
From today's vantage point this is scarcely comprehensible. How could a leading resistance figure place such trust in a Gestapo officer? The answer lies, in all likelihood, in the corrosive effectiveness of deliberate trust-building. Andergassen evidently understood, with considerable skill, how to play precisely the role Haller wanted to see: that of the man inside the system who stood “on the right side.”
Everything suggests that Haller fell victim to a profound deception. Andergassen appeared to him not as a representative of terror but as someone who, from within the system, acted in the interest of the resistance. Whether he thereby also gained insight into opposition circles, or passed such information on, remains unclear — yet the mere possibility casts a long shadow over the relationship.
Particularly troubling is a letter from Haller dated 11 May 1945. In it he describes Andergassen as a “loyal Ostmärker” — the Nazi-era term for Austrians after 1938 — and goes further still, stating that Andergassen had acted “in the spirit of the goals we had set.” The entire tragedy of the situation is compressed into that sentence: a Gestapo officer responsible for persecution, violence, and death appears here as a presumed comrade of the resistance.
The document reveals less about Andergassen's actual conduct than about his capacity for deception — and it shows how far that deception reached: into the trust of a man who believed he stood on the right side, and who did not recognise whom he was really facing.

Exoneration statement—commonly referred to as a “Persilschein”—issued for Heinrich Andergassen by Anton Haller, head of the Austrian resistance movement in Hall, on 11 May 1945. In the document, Haller portrays the former Gestapo officer as helpful and claims that he acted in accordance with the objectives of the resistance. Source: Historical Archive of the Tyrol State Police Directorate, Presidential File III 1233/46.

Head of the Austrian Resistance Movement in Hall
Hall, 11 May 1945
Heinrich Andergassen is known to me as a good and loyal “Ostmärker” [Austrian]. He appeared deeply distressed during the year of upheaval in 1938.
I therefore regarded Andergassen as a man who could be of great value to me in my work of building up the resistance movement, and for this reason I maintained regular contact with him.
During the period of National Socialist rule, he consistently proved helpful to all those whom I referred to him. He dealt with every matter in accordance with the objectives we had established.
[handwritten signature]
Anton Haller
Head of the Austrian Resistance Movement in Hall

The statement by Anton Haller, preserved in the Historical Archive of the Tyrolean State Police Directorate (Fachzirkel Exekutivgeschichte, Präsidialakt III 1233/46), rewards close reading, since in condensed form it displays the mechanisms characteristic of the entire Persilschein problem surrounding Andergassen. (A Persilschein — literally a “Persil certificate,” named after the laundry detergent — was the colloquial term for the character references that circulated after 1945 to help former Nazis or NS functionaries “wash themselves clean” during Allied denazification proceedings.)
The letterhead alone is telling: Haller signs as “Leiter der österreichischen Widerstandsbewegung Hall” (“Head of the Austrian Resistance Movement, Hall”) and dates the letter 11 May 1945 — only three days after Andergassen's arrest. This constellation points to considerable time pressure and urgency: a letter claiming such authority, composed within so short a span, suggests a deliberate, rapid intervention.
The opening statement — that Andergassen was known to him “as a good and loyal Ostmärker” — is linguistically remarkable. “Ostmärker” was a National Socialist term for Austrians after 1938; a genuine member of the resistance would normally have avoided it, speaking instead of an “Austrian.” The word choice suggests either an unreflected carrying-over of older linguistic habits, or that Haller did not consistently distinguish between National Socialist and resistance vocabulary.
The second statement — that Andergassen had appeared “very dejected during the upheaval year of 1938” — follows a classic post-war exoneration narrative: the claim of an inner distance from National Socialism that is by its nature unverifiable and purely subjective, and that recurs in similar form across numerous Persilscheine of the period.
Central is the passage in which Haller explains that Andergassen “appeared to me as the man who could be very valuable to me in my efforts to build the resistance movement.” Here Haller makes explicit why he kept up the contact: not out of mere sympathy, but in the conviction that he had gained a potential comrade-in-arms. The following sentence — that the connection was “kept up continuously” — confirms that this was regular contact over an extended period, not a single encounter, which supports the reading of a systematically, gradually built relationship of trust.
Especially problematic is Haller's statement that Andergassen “proved himself constantly helpful, throughout the period of National Socialist rule, to all those recommended to him by me.” Haller thereby confirms that he deliberately referred people to Andergassen — the Gestapo officer functioning, in this constellation, as a kind of hinge figure. Whether this reflects genuine, isolated acts of help or a deliberately constructed basis of trust cannot be settled from the document alone; the two readings are, moreover, not mutually exclusive.
The central and historically most consequential sentence of the letter reads: “He handled all matters in the spirit of the goals we had set.” This formulation goes well beyond general goodwill: it asserts that Andergassen's conduct was politically aligned with the resistance — in effect a whitewashing of the highest order, amounting to a posthumous induction into the resistance itself.
The signature — “Anton Haller, Head of the Austrian Resistance Movement, Hall” — lent the document considerable weight in May 1945, particularly vis-à-vis Allied authorities and local officials, which further explains its persuasive power.
Taken together, the document reveals three things: first, Haller's apparently genuine conviction that Andergassen had “worked for him”; second, the — retrospectively reconstructable — effectiveness of Andergassen's strategy of selective help, deliberate relationship-building, and the fostering of dependency, of which such testimonies were presumably the result; and third, the document's possible function as a “door-opener” that may have encouraged further exonerating testimonies — a hypothesis suggested by the clustering of the statements in time, though no direct causal link is documented.
Measured against the known facts — the deportations in Meran and the murders in Bozen — the letter's key sentence is historically untenable; it stands in open contradiction to any claim of having acted “in the spirit” of the resistance's goals. The letter is thus no ordinary exonerating statement: it is at once evidence of Heinrich Andergassen's extraordinary capacity for deception, and an indication that Anton Haller had, until the very end, fundamentally misjudged him.

​Heinrich Andergassen's conduct cannot be explained by individual character traits alone; it points to more fundamental mechanisms that have also been described in political philosophy and sociology.
A central point of reference is Hannah Arendt's analysis, developed in connection with the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann, of the “banality of evil.” Arendt showed that the gravest crimes need not stem from ideological fanaticism or personal cruelty, but can also arise from thoughtlessness, conformity, and the mere functioning of an individual within a system. Perpetrators appear in this light not as demonic figures, but as people who have ceased to reflect morally on their actions.
This approach, however, applies to Andergassen only in part. While he undoubtedly acted as a functionary within the National Socialist apparatus of violence, his conduct also points to a pronounced strategic calculation. Here, the ethics of purpose — prefigured by Niccolò Machiavelli and further developed by Max Weber in his distinction between an ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) and an ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) — offers an additional interpretive frame. In this perspective, actions are judged not primarily by moral principle but by their utility and consequences. Applied to Andergassen, his selective acts of assistance appear not as expressions of moral conviction but as means to particular ends — securing his own position, for instance, or building a network capable of exonerating him.
This picture is complemented by sociological approaches to the role-bound nature of human action, notably Erving Goffman's. Goffman describes social interaction as a form of “theatre,” in which individuals adopt different roles depending on context and deliberately manage the impressions they create.
Andergassen, too, evidently moved within several roles at once: as a loyal functionary of the Nazi apparatus, as an apparently helpful official toward individual prisoners, and even as a presumed point of contact for resistance circles. For his contemporaries these roles were not necessarily contradictory, since each perceived only a fragment of his conduct.
Taken together, what emerges is not the picture of a “split personality” but that of a perpetrator who combined several patterns of action: the embeddedness within a criminal system that Arendt describes, a purpose-oriented and calculating approach in the Machiavellian sense, and a pronounced ability to adapt to social expectation. It is precisely this combination that explains how Andergassen could act as a perpetrator of the gravest crimes and still be perceived by his contemporaries as “decent.”

Following Italy's exit from the war and the German occupation of northern Italy, the “Operationszone Alpenvorland” (Operations Zone Alpine Foothills) was established on 10 September 1943 — a German civil administration outside the actual territory of the Reich, covering South Tyrol together with the provinces of Trent and Belluno. The Tyrolean Gauleiter Franz Hofer became its Supreme Commissioner. The SS security police set up a “Jewish Affairs desk” immediately upon the zone's establishment, and by 12 September 1943 the first wave of arrests targeting the Jewish population of Meran had already been ordered. The SD field office in Meran, which Andergassen headed, was embedded within this administrative and police apparatus.

Of the roughly fifty Jewish residents who remained in Meran — many others had fled beforehand — twenty-five were arrested on 16 September 1943, accompanied by house searches and confiscations, and deported via the Reichenau transit camp near Innsbruck to Auschwitz. Most of the deportees subsequently perished in concentration camps. This deportation forms the immediate background to Andergassen's role as Jewish Affairs officer within the Operations Zone, and to the crimes of violence in Bozen described in this article.

The colloquial term “Persilschein” — derived from the brand name of the laundry detergent Persil — became established after 1945 for the character references with which former National Socialists or NS functionaries sought to be “washed clean” in Allied denazification proceedings. Such statements could come from very different quarters: from colleagues or superiors, but also from persecuted individuals or resistance members who had genuinely received individual help. It is precisely the latter category that lent such testimonies particular credibility, and that makes their critical assessment — as in the present case — methodologically demanding: the personal experience of an individual witness can be truthful and, at the same time, part of a larger, strategically exploited distortion.

The events of May 1945 — flight in late April, arrest by American troops near Innsbruck on 8 May, followed within days by a series of exonerating testimonies — fall within the immediate phase of the Nazi regime's collapse and the onset of Allied occupation in Tyrol. In this transitional period, in which local resistance groups such as Anton Haller's temporarily exercised quasi-official functions vis-à-vis the Allied authorities, declarations signed by resistance members carried particular weight — a circumstance that likely reinforced the effectiveness of Andergassen's presumed strategy.

According to Wikipedia's entry on Andergassen and the sources cited in this article's bibliography — including a New York Times report of 27 July 1946 — Andergassen was tried in Naples in January 1946, together with two co-defendants, Schiffer and Storz, in connection with the torture and murder of the OSS officer Roderick “Steve” Hall and several other Allied prisoners near Bozen. He was sentenced to death on 15 January 1946 and executed on 26 July 1946.

Heinrich Andergassen (1908–1946) was a Gestapo and SD functionary who, after the 1938 “Anschluss” of Austria, rose within the National Socialist security apparatus and, from 1943, headed the SD field office in Meran while also serving as Jewish Affairs officer in the Operations Zone Alpine Foothills. He was substantially involved in the persecution of Meran's Jewish population and in violent crimes in Bozen.

A “Persilschein” is the colloquial term for a character reference issued after 1945 to help exonerate a person from Nazi-era involvement during denazification — named for the cleansing action of the laundry detergent whose brand it invokes. In Andergassen's case, the conspicuous clustering of such testimonies within days of his arrest is the starting point for the source criticism developed in this article.

Anton Haller signed himself “Head of the Austrian Resistance Movement, Hall” and wrote a detailed exonerating letter for Andergassen on 11 May 1945. His document is of particular source value because it shows, in exemplary fashion, how a resistance figure appears to have fallen victim to deliberate trust-building by a Gestapo officer.

Andergassen was arrested on 8 May 1945. That several detailed and similarly worded testimonies emerged within days points to a coordinated response — possibly triggered by an existing network of relationships that Andergassen had cultivated beforehand. Such a connection is suggested by the documents but cannot be proven with final certainty.

Probably, yes — the testimonies most likely reflect real, individual acts of help. What matters is that these isolated interventions are not in contradiction with his simultaneous, active participation in deportations and violent crime; rather, on the reading developed here, they were probably part of a strategy of selective help that generated trust and provided him with a measure of protection should the need arise.

The article draws on three interpretive frameworks: Hannah Arendt's concept of the “banality of evil,” which describes crime as a product of conformity and a failure of moral reflection within a system; the ethics of purpose in the tradition of Machiavelli and Max Weber's distinction between an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility, which explains action in terms of utility and consequence rather than principle; and Erving Goffman's sociological model of self-presentation, according to which individuals adopt different roles in different social contexts. Applied to Andergassen, the result is the picture of a perpetrator who combined embeddedness in the system, strategic calculation, and role-bound adaptability.

He was tried in Naples in January 1946, together with two co-defendants, in connection with the torture and murder of Allied prisoners near Bozen, among them the OSS officer Roderick “Steve” Hall. According to Wikipedia's entry on Andergassen and the sources listed in this article's bibliography — including a New York Times report of 27 July 1946 — he was sentenced to death on 15 January 1946 and executed on 26 July 1946.

During the Nazi period, “Ostmärker” was a politically charged term used to describe Austrians. Following the “Anschluss” in March 1938, the name Austria was to disappear from public usage, while the country was presented as an integral part of the German Reich. The term derived from “Ostmark,” a name temporarily used by the Nazi regime for the former Austrian state.
When Anton Haller described Heinrich Andergassen as a “good and loyal Ostmärker” on 11 May 1945, he was therefore employing language associated with the Nazi regime. In the context of the statement, the phrase was probably intended to emphasize Andergassen’s alleged Austrian patriotism and distance from National Socialism. This creates a striking contradiction: a term closely connected with the Nazi suppression of Austrian statehood was used to exonerate a former Gestapo officer.

Parts I and II of Heinrich Andergassen's biography are accessible via the linked blog posts on this website; Part II documents in particular the further exonerating testimonies of 11–12 May 1945 referred to in the present article.