Roderick Stephen Hall

Captain Roderick Stephen Goodspeed Hall (August 12, 1915 – February 20, 1945) was an American military officer and agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. Hall was betrayed and captured behind enemy lines during a self-proposed sabotage mission in the region south of the Brenner Pass in January 1945. After one month of captivity he was executed by the Schutzstaffel (SS), who covered up his murder as a cardiac arrest. His murderers were put on trial by a U.S. military tribunal after the war. Three of them were sentenced to death and executed, while a fourth was sentenced to life in prison.

Pre-war life Hall was born in 1915 in Beijing in what was then the Republic of China. His father, Ray Ovid Hall (1891–1951), was an international business man and his mother, Gertrude Cliff (Goodspeed) Hall (1881–1964), was a doctor. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1934. He travelled internationally and visited the Italian Alps and, especially, the area around the Brenner Pass, where he spent his time climbing, hiking and skiing, becoming very familiar with the area. By profession, Hall was a geologist.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and the United States was drawn into the war, Hall had just returned to the U.S. from his travels and had enrolled at Yale University.

In June 1944 Hall was sent to Caserta, Italy, where he joined the 2677th OSS Regiment, and trained with a team of agents for his mission. Hall briefly returned to Algiers for a parachuting course before embarking with his team to the Italian mountains for language and survival skills training.

Murder Hall was handed over to the SS who ran the Bolzano transit camp, where he was tortured. He was hanged in the torture chamber of the camp on 20 February 1945, but his death was covered up to appear as a cardiac arrest. The Italian doctor who signed the death certificate was a prisoner himself and was not actually permitted to see the body.

Two other OSS agents captured around the time at Belluno were destined to suffer the same fate as Hall, but were rescued when the U.S., through channels in Switzerland, informed the German high command that they expected the prisoners to be treated in accordance with the Geneva convention as they had been captured in uniform, thereby saving their lives.

Trial

As Hall had been in uniform at the time of his capture, his execution had been in contravention of the Geneva Convention, making it a war crime. When OSS officers entered the camp at the end of the war they managed to identify Hall's grave, giving him a proper military burial. The records found at the camp served as evidence at the trial in Naples in 1946. Butz was sentenced to life in prison due to his more limited involvement. Apart from the murder of Hall, Andergassen, Schiffer, and Storz were also found guilty of the murders of six other Allied servicemen, pilot Charles Parker, SAS officers Roger Littlejohn and David Crowley, and U.S. airmen George Hammond, Hardy Narron, and Medard Tafoya.

Recognition Captain Roderick Stephen Hall was posthumously awarded the Legion of Merit,