Summery

The Nordpol case, the Englandspiel under the microscope deals with a British undercover operation in the occupied Netherlands during the Second World War that ended in total failure. The case was known to the German services involved, Abwehr IIIF and Sipo IVE, as the 'Pall Nordpol' or 'Englandspiel' respectively.
In March 1942 the wireless operator of the two sabotage agents who were dropped blind at the start of the British operation was arrested. The agent followed instructions and pretended to collaborate with the Germans, enabling him as agreed to warn London in the telegrams that he dispatched on behalf of the enemy that he was no longer at liberty. However, London kept up the connection and from May 1942 on even began to arrange the arrival and reception of new agents and supplies over his radio line and that of a second radio operator, who in the meantime had been arrested too. In their eagerness to listen in, the Germans provided the necessary reception. In this way forty-two agents and tons of supplies fell directly into German hands within the space of a single year. Most of these agents and several colleagues who had already been arrested were horribly murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp at the beginning of September 1944. A few were reported missing during the transport, and only five agents survived the terrors.

In the official Dutch inquiries, this Englandspiel, which went on until April 1944, was presented as a successful German counterespionage action against British attempts to build up cores of resistance in the occupied Netherlands from the end of 1941 on. The success of the German action was mainly due to serious errors or blunders on the part of the British service involved, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). These errors or blunders could be explained by the hasty construction of the service, the lack of trained staff and resources, the pressure under which work was carried out, and, in general, a failure at the individual level. British official accounts speak of 'errors in judgement' by those responsible for these operations, and emphatically reject 'deliberate intent' or 'betrayal' as alternative explanations.
All the same, the two latter possibilities have been and still are cautiously embroidered on in other writings on this issue because important questions remain unanswered in the official inquiries. These authors do recognise that the errors and blunders of the SOE as stated in those studies can certainly be identified, but the motive for their doubts is less the fact that the British were misled than the long period of time that this lasted and the absence of an acceptable explanation of the events that answers the key questions. With one exception, the British literature reveals a wary shift from the original 'errors in judgement' motive to the serious 'errors and blunders' interpretations. The exception is the former head of the SOE cipher office, L. Marks, who has rejected the traditional accounts by stating in television series and on paper that the Englandspiel contains an unexpected truth. Nevertheless, his book on 'SOE'S Code War', as part of the subtitle runs, did not reveal that 'truth', and the author is dead by now. Following this track, and on the basis of material from the British archives that has been declassified since then, this book tries to specify that 'unexpected truth' in more detail.

The traditional account of the Englandspiel contains two key moments: the arrest of Lauwers, the wireless operator of the first sabotage team, in March 1942; and the detention three months later of the pair of agents entrusted with the task of introducing and preparing the building up of a secret army in the occupied Netherlands in accordance with the Plan for Holland. That Plan was the brainchild of a British initiative, the Anglo-Dutch cooperation that commenced in May 1942. As far as the Dutch government was concerned, that cooperation was exclusively aimed at the building up an underground army that would not come into action until the moment of the invasion. It did not want to hear of any sabotage.
The arrested wireless operator appeared to divulge his secrets and collaborate. The knowledge and assistance that the Germans hereby acquired enabled them to infiltrate his radio line to such an extent that three months later London used the same radio link to arrange the reception of the agents responsible for the introduction of the Plan for Holland, Jambroes and Bukkens. The content of the Plan was thus known to the Germans so rapidly and in such detail that they were able to trick the SOE into believing in the construction of the secret army, for which London continued to fly in new personnel and material, at the request of the Germans, for a further eleven months.
All the agents, except for one, were dropped or put down blind until May 1942. The exception - and this was organised over Lauwers' radio link, which had been infiltrated by now - was sent to an organised reception committee headed by the Germans at the end of March. When warned soon afterwards by sabotage agents who arrived in March and April that they had been able to trace neither Lauwers nor another colleague, Dessing, London instructed Lauwers to establish contact with them from his side; the result was that all of the operational agents who were at liberty were subsequently arrested. Dessing was the only one to evade arrest and to reach London in September 1943.
Among the new prisoners was a second radio operator, Jordaan. Like Lauwers before him, Jordaan also failed to inform the Germans about a secret code that had been agreed with London, the security check, that every telegram had to contain if it was to be considered 'genuine' by London. When a telegram bearing Jordaan's name but failing to include the security check was sent to London by a German wireless operator, Jordaan was given orders by London to instruct the new operator in the use of that secret code.
Both crucial infiltrations took place before June 1942, when the SOE was still dependent for maintaining radio contact with its agents on the radio control room of MI6, the British secret service. It is noteworthy that the Germans did not manage to play back the radio lines that were operated by the same control room for the secret agents cooperating with MI6 who were arrested in the Netherlands during that period.

The questions arising from the preceding points are not answered adequately, if at all, in the two official studies of the event - a parliamentary and a historical inquiry -, partly due to the guarded behaviour of the British. That is not the only reason, however, for on a number of points the researchers failed to pursue their questions further or to make use of the available information, especially the information given under oath during the parliamentary inquiry by Lauwers on the tactics for how to act in the event of arrest that he had been taught during his training: after a show of resistance, he could disclose his code and even signal for the Germans, provided he did not tell them about the security check. One of the reasons given for this recommendation during his training was that the British could use a radio line obtained by the Germans in this way and trusted by them to set up a counteraction of their own. This indication of deliberate intent on the part of the British was not further investigated in either of the inquiries, nor was it put to the British by the researchers.
The interpretations presented in these studies, which are primarily based on the fact that the SOE Dutch Section responsible for the operations in the occupied Netherlands ignored the security checks for a period of fifteen months, account for those omissions in terms of 'serious errors or blunders' on the part of the service. As already mentioned, both studies reject the possibility that 'deliberate intent' or 'betrayal' could have been at play; conclusions that are strictly confined to the SOE. The remaining literature, including a recent book by the British historian and SOE specialist M.R.D. Foot, does not offer many new points of view either. Foot too fails to raise the obvious questions and to explore the available information, although his book is based on new SOE material that has recently been declassified. One is therefore bound to conclude that the two official studies and Foot' s study, dating respectively from six, thirty five and fifty seven years after the events, arrive at remarkably similar conclusions. In itself that might be an indication of the reliability of the statements made, were it not that none of the three inquiries under review provides a response to the crucial questions that have remained unanswered right from the start, focused on the doubts concerning Lauwers' instructions to cooperate and the reason given for them.

The SOE, of which the Dutch Section responsible for the Englandspiel was a part, turns out to have been an amalgam of three secret organs that had been in operation since 1938 - Section D, MI(R) and Electra House (ES) – and had been controversial within the British war organisation throughout the war. Section D was a part of the MIG intelligence service, MI(R) of the War Office, and ES of the Foreign Office. Each in its own field studied the possibilities for causing harm to the enemy by subversive action in the event of war, and the necessary precautions were taken in anticipation of such a situation. The general division of labour was as follows:

. Section D - sabotage and political subversion, activities that could not be discussed officially with the authorities of the country involved and that had to be carried out without their prior knowledge and even against their will;
. MI(R) - activities of a paramilitary nature that could be, discussed with the authorities involved and conducted with their assistance.
. ES - 'black' propaganda.

Under pressure of the confusion surrounding the fall of France, with the Germans on the Channel coast, a hasty decision was made in London to merge the three organs to form a new service, the SOE, under the Minister of Economic Warfare, as an autonomous body, at least in theory. It was an attempt to organise a coordinated approach in the occupied countries of the weapon that could still be used in addition to bombardment: subversion. The primary aim was to combat the Germans in occupied Europe, and elsewhere with the same objectionable practices that, London believed, had contributed to the unexpected and rapid German success in the West: political agitation, sedition, sabotage, fifth-column activities, and so on.
The hastily formed service' was completely dependent on the rival MI6 with respect to a number of essential points until late in 1942, such as communication with its agents in the field, transport and supplies, including transmitters, codes, false documents, etc. Throughout the war the SOE was to remain dependent on the 'protection' supplied by MI6 in the field against the counterespionage activities of the enemy that the SOE had so much to fear from, on the basis of the information about the enemy collected by this service. One of the ways in which Section v of MI6, which was responsible for this type of information for fighter protection, collected its data was by tapping and deciphering encoded German radio traffic. That section had the monopoly of collecting and distributing this sort of information.
At top policy level the SOE proved not to be autonomous; the minister responsible was not a member of the War Cabinet where the wartime strategy was determined. As such he was not informed about top-level secret plans and intentions. SOE policy was expected to fit in with the strategy drawn up by the Chiefs of Staff. That policy on the occupied and neutral countries was closely monitored by the Foreign Office that had the right to veto planned operations. Though in theory autonomous, in actual fact the service had its hands tied, and its operations were of ten frustrated, particularly by MIG, that rightly saw SOE not only as a riyal but also as an extra risk to its own dangerous work. The SOE actions, which were sometimes spectacular and of ten caused quite astir, did not exactly create the ideal climate for the gathering of information. A second source of friction came from the governments in exile in London. They were above all concerned with securing their interests in the mother country in preparation for an 'unharmed' return after the war. They therefore had absolutely nothing to gain from organising and arming the resistance in their own country when they were not themselves, in control of it. There were justified fears of arousing popular resentment at the reprisals of the enemy in retaliation for acts of sabotage and resistance.
After the war the Belgian government collected material for a number of prosecutions of Belgian agents who returned from detention by the Germans to face charges of having collaborated with the enemy. This material shows that the instructions given to Lauwers about how to act in the event of being arrested were also given to Belgian agents. Other documents reveal that the British counterespionage service, MI5, really did try to use the radio lines that had been infiltrated by the Germans for operational purposes of misleading them, and that, just as in the Netherlands, Belgian SOE networks were penetrated on a large scale by the enemy in 1942. Unlike the SOE Dutch Section, those in charge of the Belgian Section managed to put a stop to that process at the end of 1942, partly on the basis of reports by two security experts. One of those experts expressed his surprise to the higher SOE leadership at being bound to conclude that the codes and security checks in use by the SOE were completely inadequate, and at the fact that' the agents dispatched had no way of warning headquarters that they had been arrested independently of initiatives in London. And since the radio operators in London had no way of determining whether the operator whose messages they received really sent them himself, he recommended recording the 'signature' of the radio operators on tape before they were sent out. Finally, this expert noted that no use had been made of direction-finding technology to determine whether a transmitter really was transmitting from the location it was supposed to be operating from. None of these points raised led to a review of the Englandspiel that was still operating at the end of 1942, not even when shortly afterwards the chief cipher officer of SOE issued a report at the highest level containing the suspicions in writing about the radio traffic conducted by the Dutch Section with the occupied Netherlands that he had been expressing orally to his superiors since the summer of 1942.
An analysis of wartime British intelligence and of a number of documents produced in that connection reveals that in March 1942 the top rank of the SOE agreed to the use of 'contaminated' radio lines of the service for undercover operations, organised by the Double-Cross or Twenty Committee. This project organisation of MI5, MI6, the military intelligence and other services had been set up at the beginning of 1941 with the main task of coordinating the passing on of misleading information to the enemy by using double agents and other means.A serious problem with activities of this kind turns out to have been the permanent shortage of suitable, sufficiently credible information to pass on to the enemy with a view to keeping those misleading channels open for future use. Analysis of the documents shows that at least one 'contaminated' radio transmitter in the Netherlands was offered to the Twenty Committee in July 1942, and correspondence addressed to Lauwers from one of his former instructors also shows that Lauwers' radio transmissions were immediately removed from the normal routines and moved elsewhere after his warning signals had been received in England.
Research on a number of reports compiled when, after the successful escape of two SOE agents from detention by the Germans, the truth about what had been going on in the Netherlands began to dawn on London, leads to the conclusion that the search for the causes of the events went no further back than July 1942, the start of the implementation of the Plan for Holland. The preceding months, when the German infiltration of Lauwers' and Jordaan's radio lines took effect, were not subjected to detailed scrutiny. This conclusion finds confirmation in the discovery that when Lauwers returned to England, he was not questioned about his actions and behaviour while under detention, not even in connection with his own written after action report, even though, as a SOE document from 1945 notes, he was the only SOE agent to cite having acted in custody in according with British instructions in his defence.

This all leads to the final conclusion that the Englandspiel was based on a deliberate British action in the Netherlands whose dramatic course was not foreseen at the time of that action. It was a ploy that was intended to make such an authentic impression on the enemy that it was considered necessary to play agents and supplies directly into German hands as a means of tricking the enemy into believing in a possible and plausible objective. The SOE Dutch Section and its agents were deployed as the means. Until the spring of 1943 that stake was used to contribute to building up the credibility of German spies who had changed sides after being arrested by the British. With a view to a strategic misleading role in the future, these (double) agents had to be presented in the eyes of their former masters as their most reliable source of information in England. This scheme was implemented in the spring of 1942. With the main emphasis on the implementation of the Plan for Holland - an implementation that the Germans themselves had invented -, the permanent threat of an Allied invasion was created in the second half of 1942. The purpose of that spectre was to tie German troops up in the West in order to relieve pressure on the fronts elsewhere, particularly the Russian front.
By the spring of 1943 both tasks had in theory been completed; they were taken over by regular forms of operations, and the unavowable operations could be terminated. Now that the definitive decision to attack in the West had been taken and the threat of an actual invasion gradually began to take shape, the fictional variant, the Englandspiel, could be dropped. The German agents in England who had changed sides now turned their attention to passing on 'reliable' information about the building up of the Anglo-American invasion troops in that country in the framework of Operation Overlord.

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