October 1841. Afterward, he held a series of police-related positions
in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Linz before his retirement in 1850.NOLLAU, GÜNTER (1911–1991). A lawyer and third president of
the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Günter Nollau was
born in Leipzig on 4 June 1911. His legal career began in Cracow,
Poland, in 1942 and shifted to Dresden at the end of World War
II. Accused of murder by East German authorities, he fled to West
Berlin in 1950 and began his association with the BfV. On 1 May
1972, Nollau was named head of the organization, replacing Hubert
Schrübbers, whose past role as a Nazi prosecutor of political crimes
had come to light and forced his early retirement. But owing to
the apparent negligence of the BfV during the Günter Guillaume
affair, Nollau’s tenure also ended prematurely. Leaving office in
mid-November 1975, he continued to insist that he had given ad-
equate warning about Guillaume to Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher. A prolific author, Nollau published his memoirs, Das
Amt (The Office), in 1978. In addition, he remained one of the most
outspoken critics of Reinhard Gehlen. Nollau died in Munich on
7 November 1991.
NORDPOL. A highly successful Abwehr deception during World
War II, Operation nordpol (North Pole) was directed at the un-
derground resistance network in Holland supported by the British
Special Operations Executive (SOE). Whereas the Abwehr as-
signed the code name nordpol, the German name englandspiel
was adopted by the Dutch. It began in November 1941 when Her-
mann Giskes, the head of Abwehr operations in the Netherlands,
captured the first Dutch radio transmitter and pretended that it was
still operated by the resistance. Expanded to a joint operation with
the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), nordpol continued until
March 1944 and yielded much valuable information about SOE
activities in Western Europe. More than 50 Dutch agents returned
to the Netherlands by the British were captured by the occupying
Germans and eventually executed. Still controversial is the fact
that the coded warnings back to London by the Dutch radio op-
erators went unheeded. Giskes’s own account, Spione überspielen
Spione (Spies Outplay Spies), appeared in 1951.
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