10 Facts About Hermann Giskes

Hermann Josef Giskes was a German intelligence officer of the Abwehr, the military intelligence department of the German military forces during World War II.

Hermann Giskes is best known for being the head of the counter-intelligence department of the Abwehr in the Netherlands from 1941 to 1944.

Hermann Giskes carried out an operation called Englandspiel or Operation North Pole which resulted in the capture of more than 50 agents of Britain's Special Operations Executive and the confiscation of tons of military equipment, including weapons, which SOE had parachuted into the Netherlands to arm Dutch groups resisting the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany.

Hermann Josef Giskes was born in Krefeld, the third of four children of Wilhelm and Maria Giskes.

From April 1918, Hermann Giskes was again on the Western Front with Infantry Regiment No 471, where he was taken prisoner by the French on October 12,1918.

Hermann Giskes's activities were responsible for supplying a great deal of disinformation to British intelligence services for much of World War II, and for the arrest of more than 50 Special Operations Executive agents, nearly all of whom were executed.

Hermann Giskes first succeeded in forcing captured SOE agent Huub Lauwers under duress to send encrypted messages back to the British SOE headquarters at Hermann Giskes' direction.

Hermann Giskes continued to use captured SOE radios to mislead the SOE, who failed to recognize, despite many clues, that its operations in the Netherlands were controlled by the Germans.

In 1945, near the end of World War II, Hermann Giskes was captured by Allied forces and interrogated by both the British and the Americans.

Hermann Giskes was released in September 1946, and became an employee of the Gehlen Organization, an intelligence company that worked with the American occupation authorities in a defeated Germany.