Englandspiel

Titus Leeser's "Englandspiel Monument" or The Fall of Icarus in The Hague memorializes the 54 agents who were dropped into the Netherlands during Das Englandspiel. The inscription says, in part "They jumped to their death for our freedom."

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 50 Allied agents were identified, captured, and executed.

Details

The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) was sending Dutch intelligence agents into the occupied Netherlands during the war. The operatives were usually flown out at night and either dropped by parachute from converted Handley Page Halifax bombers or landed in deserted fields by Westland Lysander STOL aircraft, which could also pick-up agents at the same time for flying back to Britain. SOE air operations were based at RAF Tempsford. As early as 1942, the operation in the Netherlands 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, which should have alerted the SOE that they had been compromised. Further, SOE's head of codes Leo Marks claims to have quickly 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. In the documentary Churchill's Secret Army he recounts how a wireless operator ended a telegraphic radio communication with "HH", which stood for Heil Hitler and was the usual closing for German communications. The other party instantly replied "HH" which indicated it was a German who was used to doing it automatically and not a British agent who would have been confused by the two letters. Finally, he sent them a deliberate indecipherable message of his own, which was replied to. He reasoned that no ordinary agent could have reconstructed his message. He reported these findings to his superior who told him to not discuss the matter with anybody else and no action was taken.

It was reported that agents who were supposed to return from the Netherlands had 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 the Netherlands.[1]

The operation was not completely shut down until Giskes himself sent 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 the Netherlands".[2]

By November 1942 it was clear to the signals section that agents were in German hands. The fact that neither the Dutch section, overseeing "operations" in the Netherlands, nor other services were notified is probably motivated by inter-departmental rivalry.[3] 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.

Marks claims in his book that the real issue was internal rivalry between the SOE and intelligence gathering CIS, and so SOE did not want to admit any error. Marks says he was ordered to deliberately withhold important cryptographic information from people investigating the Dutch operation at the time.

A plaque regarding the Englandspiel on the Binnenhof in The Hague

Agents

During the Englandspiel the following people (amongst others) were dropped in the Netherlands:

Aftermath

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 security checks, which were deliberate errors introduced into messages by the sending agent, the scheme for which was known only to the agent and the SOE. The existence of security checks in messages indicated that the sender was the legitimate agent and that they were acting under their own free will. However, the absence of security checks represented a vitally important duress code, which should have warned SOE that the sender was either an imposter, or a legitimate agent who had been captured and coerced into working for the Nazis. Repeatedly ignoring the significance of the absent security checks was a serious violation of the SOE's own transmission protocol.

In popular culture

References

Notes

  1. ↑ The Secret War - Englandspiel, broadcast on Yesterday, 21 June 2011.
  2. ↑ "Secrets of World War II: Confusion Was Their Business (TV episode 1998)". IMDb. 2011. Retrieved 2 December 2011.
  3. ↑ van der Mandele, Hugh (2012). "The Dutch Affair Revisited or the Destructive Power of Organizational Warfare, Intelligence and National Security". doi:10.1080/02684527.2012.735077.
  4. ↑ Secret War at the Internet Movie Database
  5. ↑ Secrets of WWII at the Internet Movie Database

Bibliography

External links

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