How World War II POWs rolled the dice on Monopoly to win their freedom

New York Post

20-07-2025

In the bitter winter of 1941, British military prisoners in Nazi-occupied Germany huddled around a Monopoly set, dazzled by the contents that awaited them.
They didn't pluck Community Chest cards. They looked past the thimble and race-car tokens, ignored the tiny houses and phony deeds. The real treasures were hidden within the board and its packaging: tools that could be the difference between making a daring escape and staring down a firing squad.
To unsuspecting captives and guards patrolling nearby, it looked like any other edition of the board game ubiquitous in homes across the United States and Europe. But for Britain's covert MI9 intelligence unit, this doctored Monopoly set was a Trojan horse — one of many that helped Allied troops break out of prisoner-of-war camps and find their way to safety during World War II.
'While Monopoly is considered a plaything . . . its role during the war belied any triviality,' writes Philip E. Orbanes in 'Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game of Monopoly to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes' (Harper, July 15), his fourth book focused on the iconic tabletop game.
4 British army officers enjoy a game of Monopoly in 1942.
Getty Images
These deceptive parcels, smuggled among authentic games, often included forged identification, a miniature compass, fake uniforms, real currency and coded messages from back home. They served as 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards for thousands of Allied prisoners.
'Monopoly was selected to smuggle escape aids because its game board was large and accommodative — and because the vast majority of service men and women knew and desired it,' writes Orbanes, former head of research and development at the game's American originator, Parker Brothers.
The scheme was conceived in the mind of Christopher Clayton Hutton, a World War I vet and amateur illusionist known as 'Clutty.' The MI9 operative believed anything — even a children's game — could be weaponized.
Clutty realized Monopoly sets were manufactured in the same Leeds factory that produced silk maps for airmen. Since the fabric didn't crinkle or tear like paper, it was the perfect material for slipping past Nazi sentries.
He teamed up with Norman Watson — head of Britain's Monopoly licensee, Waddingtons — to turn the game into a stealth survival pack.
In a secure basement nicknamed 'the Beast,' workers hollowed out game boards and concealed instruments for escape.
Abnormal markers, such as an errant red dot on the board's Free Parking corner, signified the package's intended destination and tipped off recipients in the know. Before deployment, Allied airmen were taught to spot doctored sets and wield the items to their advantage.
The games arrived packaged with food and other rations sent to prison camps from fictitious humanitarian organizations, addressed to specific POWs trained to coordinate escape efforts and decode instructions from back home, which sometimes incorporated altered playing cards.
The first true test of the loaded Monopoly kits came at the infamous German fortress Colditz Castle, a medieval Saxony prison reserved for high-flight-risk Allied captives.
British Lt. Airey Neave and Dutch officer Tony Luteyn staged a high-stakes escape in 1941. The two men donned fraudulent uniforms, slipped out through a service shaft, scaled a tall wall and trudged through freezing conditions to flee the facility.
Despite dangerous brushes with German authorities via public transit, they crossed Nazi Germany undetected, never looking back until they made it to Switzerland.
'Every British airman who made it home improved the morale of fellow airmen and provided further return on the £10,000 cost of his training — a substantial sum for the time,' Orbanes writes.
The success of these escape aids inspired US military officials to adopt similar tactics, launching a Virginia-based intelligence agency called MIS-X in 1942.
This organization purchased the classic board game in bulk, dubbing manipulated versions Monopoly X (as opposed to the unaltered Monopoly V, for 'vanilla') and coordinating their delivery to servicemen trapped behind enemy lines.
One unidentified escaper, Orbanes notes, likened getaways to actual gameplay, 'avoiding the spaces with houses and hotels . . . until we reached safety.'
4 Fake documents, maps, money and other vital escape items could all be stashed within the hollowed-out Monopoly X game board — which escapees would then destroy to keep the secret safe.
Philip E. Orbanes
As the first British officer to roll the dice on the rigged Monopoly set and win, Neave joined MI9 to help coordinate similar underground operations across Europe. These networks comprised ordinary civilians risking it all to shuttle soldiers across international borders.
Those everyday heroes included bada– women like Benoîte Jean, a French resistance fighter who disarmed men with her alluring looks and kept cooler than Swiss snowbanks when engaging in espionage.
The Monopoly mademoiselle (code name: Nori, a reversal of the iron-shaped playing piece) stashed within a lipstick tube sensitive information about a crucial German bombing target.
She escorted escaped airmen to Brussels en masse and hid microfilm messages for foreign officials beneath artificial fingernails.
On one mission to inform an American intelligence official of traitors in the White House, Jean was intercepted by a major in Hitler's military-police unit who attempted to coerce her into accompanying him to his hotel room for sex.
She played along just long enough to gain the upper hand.
Then Jean mounted the Gestapo officer and drove his dagger into his neck.
'Tears filled her eyes,' Orbanes writes, recreating the act of self-preservation, 'and her breath came in spasms as he died.'
4 French resistance fighter Benoîte Jean stabbed a German officer with his own dagger.
Courtesy of Waldemar van Zedtwitz
For all the wartime bravery and ingenuity 'Monopoly X' uncovers, there was also a snake.
Enter Harold Cole: a British army deserter loyal only to his own interests.
After leading scores of stranded soldiers from Belgium to Marseille, the smooth-talking Cole became a double agent, feeding German intelligence agents information about resistance members and safe houses.
'Cole's heart was as black as a winter's night,' Orbanes writes. 'And just as cold.'
Equal parts charming and deceptive, the Monopoly-obsessed turncoat (code name: Top Hat) routinely evaded capture or talked his way out of dangerous situations. His betrayal was so damaging to Allied escape missions, he was targeted in a 1944 failed assassination in Paris.
The would-be shooter was a British captain and former POW who became romantically involved with Jean after she led him to freedom.
But the Top Hat's demise came two years later, after he weaseled his way into the postwar American occupying forces to rip off fugitive Nazis. He was shot dead in a standoff with a French policeman who'd become hip to his treacherous track record.
'The heroics and flaws of many dissimilar people were linked by Monopoly's secrets,' Orbanes writes.
Still, no one traitor could undermine Monopoly's massive success in helping liberate captured soldiers.
Perhaps the operation's greatest achievement is it remained confidential, operating under the noses of Nazi guards until Germany surrendered to Allied forces in 1945.
Servicemen who received the doctored sets protected the secret by stringently destroying and disposing of them after extracting their gifts.
When the war ended, the classified British and American agencies that used Monopoly for spycraft destroyed records of their existence and obligated privy parties to keep quiet.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and members of Congress were ignorant of the operation.
'Parker Brothers — the firm that had made Monopoly a household name — would not know, until decades later, that its game was used to smuggle escape aids,' Orbanes writes. 'Something stirs the heart when contemplating how an 'innocent' means of home entertainment affected a global struggle.'