Englandspiel
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.
[3] The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was created by the United Kingdom on July 22, 1940, in accordance with Prime Minister Winston Churchill's directive to "set Europe ablaze.
"[4] The objective of the SOE was to undertake "irregular warfare" with sabotage and subversion in countries occupied by Nazi Germany and other Axis powers.
"[5] The opposite numbers of the SOE leaders in the German-occupied Netherlands were Majors Hermann Giskes of the Abwehr and Joseph Schreieder of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS.
The country was densely populated and lacked forests and mountains where resistance forces could hide; isolated areas suitable for landing aeroplanes or parachute drops of arms and supplies for the resistance were hard to find; the coast was flat and the beaches guarded and often mined by the Germans, offering little opportunity to bring in agents and supplies by boat or submarine.
[7] Thus began das Englandspiel... an extraordinary two-year Abwehr operation that netted more than fifty London-sent Dutch agents... not to mention hundreds of tons of arms and explosives.
[9] SOE's first two Dutch agents, wireless operator Huub Lauwers and saboteur Thys Taconis, parachuted into the Netherlands on the night of 6/7 November 1941.
The absence of security checks represented a vitally-important duress code, which should have warned SOE that the sender was either an impostor or a legitimate agent who had been captured and coerced into working for the Nazis.
Agents and supplies, including weapons, were usually flown out of Britain at night and dropped by parachute from converted Handley Page Halifax bombers or landed in fields by Westland Lysander STOL aircraft.
[11][12] Several captured Dutch radio operators continued broadcasting encrypted messages but without security checks, which should have alerted SOE that they had been compromised.
The RAF had noticed that its flights to the Netherlands always arrived without opposition and that landing areas were "too bloody perfect", but planes were fired upon during their return trip to England and suffered unusually-high losses.
[18] The end of Englandspiel came on 1 April 1944, with Giskes sending a taunting message to SOE complaining about the lack of recent business from England given that he had been servicing them for so long.
[19] The fifty Dutch SOE agents that had been captured by the Germans were transported to Mauthausen concentration camp in September 1944 as allied military forces were advancing into the Netherlands, and eventually executed.
However, engendered by Englandspiel the British distrusted the Dutch resistance which prevented it from having an impact in Operation Market Garden, the unsuccessful offensive by allied military forces in the Netherlands in September 1944.
Had it not been ignored, the resistance would have been helpful in providing badly needed intelligence and communications to the division which had to be withdrawn from the battlefield after heavy losses.
"[20] The contrary and more accepted view of M.R.D Foot is that “the agents were victims of sound police work on the German side, assisted by Anglo-Dutch incompetence in London.
