Hermann Josef Giskes was a Lt. Colonel in the Abwehr, the military intelligence Department of the German military forces during World War II. He is best known for being the head of the counter-intelligence department of the Abwehr in the Netherlands from 1941 to 1944. He 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 (SOE) 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. Most of the captured agents were executed after being forced to participate in a disinformation campaign which led SOE to believe that its agents were being successful in organizing and supplying the Dutch resistance.

Englandspiel, or Operation North Pole, was a successful counterintelligence operation of the Abwehr 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).