'Nordpol' (i) was a German counter-espionage operation, known to its Sicherheitsdienst (security service) originators as the Englandspiel (England game) but to the Abwehr as 'Nordpol' (i), to convince the British Special Operations Executive that its intelligence network in the Netherlands had not been penetrated by the Germans (March 1942/November 1943).

The Germans 'played' several such Funkspiele (radio games), of which this was in all probability the most successful. By March 1942 the British had landed in the Netherlands six SOE and eight MI6 agents, and five of these (two from SOE and three from MI6) had been captured. One of these, an SOE radio operator named Hubert Lauwers, was used by Oberstleutnant Hermann Giskes, head of the Abwehr in the Netherlands, and by Major Josef Schreieder of the Sicherheitsdienst to transmit false messages to London. This was an eventuality both SOE and MI6 had considered, and the two services had therefore issued each agent with a security check, usually a deliberate spelling mistake.

When Giskes had, earlier in the month, tried to start a Funkspiel using one of the captured MI6 operators, he had failed to elicit any response from London because the operator, Willem van der Reyden, had not revealed his security check. However, when Lauwers' message arrived without his security check, the head of SOE’s Dutch section, Major Charles Blizard, accepted it as authentic and began passing messages to Lauwers and thus, of course, to the German security forces. This resulted in all but two of the remaining agents being arrested. One of them, a radio operator named Hendrik Jordaan, denied having a security check and refused to send any messages. So when a German operator transmitted a message in his name it, too, failed to contain the correct security check. Again Blizard ignored the warning and compounded his error by signalling Jordaan to instruct his new operator in the use of his security check, and Jordaan therefore had to reveal it.

Giskes and Schreieder were now able to pick up every agent whose arrival was announced to Lauwers and Jordaan, and this gave them another three radio links. It also resulted in the capture, on 27 June 1942, of George Jambroes and his radio operator, who were involved in 'Plan for Holland', the blueprint for a 1,000-strong Dutch resistance network. This had been drawn up by SOE in collaboration with Colonel M. R. de Bruyne, head of special operations for the Dutch government-in-exile, and it was later expanded by de Bruyne’s 'Plan B' for a 10,000-strong resistance network.

To help implement these plans a further 27 agents were dropped by the SOE between September 1942 and May 1943, as were nine others on different missions. All were captured, enabling Giskes and Schreieder to increase their contact with London to 17 different links. At least four of the messages transmitted to London by these links excluded the security checks of their operators, and Lauwers also tried to reveal his predicament by twice using the word 'caught' as the jumble of letters that, as a security measure, preceded and ended all messages. Despite these attempts to warn London, Blizard and Major Seymour Bingham, his successor from February 1943, continued to transmit messages to the captured agents. Early in 1943 Bingham, and then de Bruyne, did finally start to have reservations about the Dutch network, but neither acted when in June a somewhat garbled message was received from a Dutch resistance leader that eight agents had been 'arrested weeks ago'.

During the summer, Giskes and Schreieder arranged for a series of fake sabotage attacks in the Netherlands, and these seemed to reassure Bingham that his agents were still free and working successfully. In November 1943, the month in which the RAF demanded an investigation into the loss of so many of its aircraft during clandestine missions to the Netherlands, the Dutch legation in Berne reported that two of the captured agents had escaped to Switzerland. Though they revealed the existence of the Funkspiel, Bingham remained unconvinced, especially after the Germans radioed London that the two agents had not really escaped at all but had been returned to the fold as double agents. When the two escapers eventually arrived in the UK in February 1944 the authorities, erring on the side of caution, imprisoned them.

By then, however, the Joint Intelligence Committee had come to the conclusion that penetration of the Dutch network had probably occurred and further communication with it was forbidden. On 1 April 1944 Giskes and Schreieder themselves broke off communication with a final mocking message.

Although the Englandspiel had been a great tactical success for the German intelligence services, it had not produced the great strategic secret they had been seeking, namely the date and location of the planned Allied invasion of France. The Englandspiel cost the lives of 54 agents, and also those of a number of other Dutch civilians and about 50 RAF personnel. It also caused havoc in two French resistance networks when, through information received by the Funkspiel, Giskes was able to penetrate their organisations. As a result at least 132 people lost their lives and many others were arrested.