Englandspiel

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Englandspiel ('England Game'), or Operation North Pole (German: Unternehmen Nordpol), was a successful counterintelligence operation of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) from 1942 to 1944 during World War II. German counter-intelligence operatives, headed by Hermann Giskes of the Abwehr and Joseph Schreider of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), captured Allied resistance agents operating in the Netherlands and used the agents' radios and codes to dupe the United Kingdom's clandestine organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), into continuing to infiltrate agents, weapons, and supplies into the Netherlands. The Germans captured nearly all the agents and weapons sent by the United Kingdom (Britain). Englandspiel was a "catastrophe" for SOE and the Dutch resistance, "a textbook illustration, the world over, in how not to conduct clandestine work." Fifty-four SOE agents sent from England were captured by the Germans and only four survived. The other fifty were executed or died in concentration camps. The Dutch resistance was substantial in numbers but lacked weapons. If armed, as had been the objective of SOE, it might have played an important role helping the allied military forces in their failed attempt to expel the Germans from the Netherlands in 1944.