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Hello and welcome to The Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last

and today using recordings from the BBC Archive,

we tell the story of one of the biggest Allied espionage disasters

of the Second World War,

which resulted in the deaths of dozens of Dutch agents, it became known as

England spiel.

May 10th, 1940, Germany invades Holland.

Rotterdam destroyed by the Luftwaffe. In four days Dutch resistance has collapsed. The German occupation of Holland has begun. In late 1941 a Dutch wireless operator codename Ebenezer parachuted into the Netherlands a country then under Nazi control

His real name was Hal Blowers and he worked for the Special Operations Executive,

S.O.E. a secret organization created by the British to work with local

resistance groups to wage a guerrilla war in Nazi occupied Europe.

Once on the ground, Lowers made his way to the Hague and by March 1942 had set up his secret radio link to London from the apartment of a Mr and Mrs

Teller. What he did not know was that the Germans had been tipped off by a Dutch informer

and had tracked his radio signal to the apartment.

In the 1980s, Hal Blowers spoke to the BBC.

I was due to transmit on the 6th of March 1942 when Wautteller came up and told me that

...