Das Englandspiel ("The England Game"), also called Unternehmen Nordpol ("Operation North Pole"), was an enormous counter intelligence operation launched by the German intelligence agency, the Abwehr, during World War II. German forces captured Allied resistance agents operating in the Netherlands and used the agents' codes to fool the Allies into continuing to provide the agents with information and supplies. About fifty Allied agents were identified, captured, and executed.
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The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) was sending Dutch intelligence agents into the occupied Netherlands during the war. As early as 1942, the operation was penetrated by the German counter-espionage under Major Hermann Giskes of the Abwehr and continued under German control.
Apprehended radio operators continued broadcasting encrypted messages, but without the required security checks that should have alerted the SOE that they had been compromised. Further, SOE's head of codes Leo Marks claims to have soon realised that unlike all other coded messages, the Dutch messages contained no errors which made them indecipherable. He reasoned that this was because they were not coded in the field, but by German cryptographers. Finally, he sent them a deliberate indecipherable of his own, which was replied to. He reasoned that no ordinary agent could have resurrected his message. However no action was taken.
It was reported that agents that were supposed to return from the Netherlands met with various calamities and so could not return. Further, in 1943, two Dutch agents did manage to escape from captivity, but their claims on returning to Britain were dismissed (and they were arrested for suspected counter-espionage) due to a fake message sent by Giskes that two German agents were being sent to the UK from Holland.[1]
The operation was not completely shut down until Giskes himself send a cynical clear text message to the SOE on 1 April 1944 complaining about the lack of recent business given that he had been servicing them for so long. Giskes' message also "promised a warm welcome to any further agents SOE wished to insert into Holland".[2]
One reason for the inability of the SOE to realise that the ring was broken was inter-departmental rivalry. This was between the individual country sections, between the country sections and the central code section, and most importantly between the SOE and the rival Secret Intelligence Service ("C") from which SOE had been created. Any failure would weaken political positions.
It has also been argued that SOE had set up the operation for the single purpose of leading the Germans into believing that an invasion would take place in the Netherlands (rather than Normandy). Similar allegations have been made about the fate of Francis Suttill and the SOE "Prosper" network in France. However, the decision to land at Normandy had not been made until late into the Englandspiel saga.
Certainly Marks states in his book that he was ordered to deliberately withhold important cryptographic information from people investigating the Dutch operation at the time.
During the Englandspiel the following people (amongst others) were dropped in the Netherlands:
After the war reproaches were made to the SOE for serious flaws in the preparation of the missions, and for ignoring warnings that agents had been caught (notably the absence of the security checks - a change in the transmission protocol).