Latest news with #Nazi-occupied
New York Post
2 days ago
- New York Post
How World War II POWs rolled the dice on Monopoly to win their freedom
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.'
Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Ambition and delusion: The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, reviewed
As bombs rain down on Nazi-occupied Prague, Georg Wilhelm Pabst shoots a film – a romantic courtroom drama adapted from a pulp novel by a creepy Third Reich hack, Alfred Karrasch. Although the leading man finds it strange to make any movie 'in the middle of the apocalypse', his director insists that 'art is always out of place'. In retrospect, Pabst assures the star, it will look like 'the only thing that mattered'. The discoverer of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, and the director of The Joyless Street, Lulu, Westfront 1918 and other prewar masterpieces, Pabst really did attempt to film The Molander Case in Prague in 1944-45. The bizarre, chaotic shoot furnishes Daniel Kehlmann with the climactic scenes of this novel, inspired by the great director's compromised career. Molander, in which Pabst sought to redeem a slice of Nazi tripe and show that 'human life is unfulfilled', did not survive. But would even the most sublime of films have erased the 'diabolical madness' of its origin? In Kehlmann's telling, Pabst even agrees to enlist a concert hall of extras from inmates of the Terezín concentration camp. So far as we know, Kehlmann invents that particular atrocity. But he does not alter the against-the-tide trajectory that Pabst actually chose in 1939. After years in Hollywood among fellow émigrés, the Vienna-born film-maker returned to care for his sick mother at the ramshackle Austrian 'castle' – more a run-down hunting lodge – that his global renown had bought. Trapped by the outbreak of war, 'Red Pabst' somehow agreed to make movies for the Nazi film industry. We don't need propaganda from you, urges Dr Goebbels, but 'deep films for deep people' to counter America's 'cheap commercial trash'. Seduced by 'good scripts, high budgets and the best actors', Pabst for a while fools himself that he will stay true to his gift. Obey the rules and, at the UFA studios, 'you feel almost free'. In novels such as Tyll, Fame and Measuring the World, the German-Austrian Kehlmann – whose Jewish paternal grandparents came through the war thanks to forged papers – has created trickster and magician characters whose imagination reframes actuality. As he trudges to the Prague station with a sackload of reels, Pabst the master-editor wants to jump-cut himself to journey's end. Everything should be 'up for manipulation'. Kehlmann teases out the curious affinity between Pabst's talent for cinematic illusion and the fantasy and spectacle of Nazi rule. Trude, his shrewd but cowed wife, comments: 'A state like this is perfectly suited for cinema.' The wizard of camera lens and cutting room, Pabst gaslights his audience. Hitler and Goebbels gaslit Germany – indeed, much of the world. Many books, films and plays have interrogated artists' entanglement – voluntary or coerced – with Nazi or Soviet tyranny. Others have revived the émigré Hollywood of the 1930s, where we meet Pabst as, in fractured English, he spars in the alien sun with back-slapping, bone-headed studio philistines: 'No emigrant survived a flop.' But Kehlmann brings a special set of fictional tools to his task. As a novelist, he loves to tilt angles, change filters, switch viewpoints: hence this story of a rare creative returnee to the Reich. An agile comedian, Kehlmann can wrench bitter laughs from a landscape of moral catastrophe. Goebbels summons the director but (gaslighting again) asks affably why the old lefty desired to see the minister for propaganda. Might he wish to do 'penance' for his radical past? Reality blurs and twists. Befogged, Pabst agrees that he wants to help 'build Germany'. Kehlmann stages such encounters with immaculate cunning and flair. As the director stumbles into collaboration, the comedy of crossed wires and missed connections slides into the tragedy of life-defining guilt. Marooned in the dank 'castle' with Trude and their son Jakob, Pabst endures the embrace of the Reich under the iron fist of his Nazi caretaker, Jerzabek. This janitor from hell is the superbly comic-sinister embodiment of a time and place where power strikes random blows and 'nothing needs a reason'. Oblique, eccentric, droll, the light touch with grave themes may remind you not just of Tom Stoppard – whose Leopoldstadt Kehlmann has translated – but Alan Bennett, whom he much admires. Another icon of British humour adds one more surprise viewpoint to this fresco of ambition and delusion. In Salzburg, the never-named P.G. Wodehouse – a comfortable prisoner-of-war but also the notorious broadcaster of anodyne chats on Berlin radio – watches the premiere of Pabst's 1943 film Paracelsus, about the Renaissance alchemist and healer. With deadpan nonchalance, Wodehouse admires the Gothic frenzy of the movie's disruptive Dance of Death: 'The German expertise in these matters is indeed unparalleled.' Kehlmann has fun with the Wodehouse voice – sardonic, but not silly. His fine translator Ross Benjamin smartly adjusts the register to every shift of tone and timbre. But Wodehouse never saw the Salzburg premiere. As a naive genius likewise ensnared by the Reich, his presence lets Kehlmann view his theme through a fresh lens. Pabst, who believes that 'it's in editing that you make a film', would no doubt have approved of this patchwork of expertly spliced set pieces. The Director offers a hugely entertaining collage of characters, events and ideas. From wise, tough Louise Brooks to that vainglorious bully Leni Riefenstahl, historical figures deliver witty cameo turns. But Kehlmann himself reframes the past. Young Jakob Pabst, an aspiring artist who joins the Hitler Youth, is a fiction; Kehlmann forges the Molander shoot, including those skeletal extras, out of a documentary void. The novel implies that all creators – not just those complicit with dictators – deploy sorcery and alchemy to transform the raw stuff of life. What's beyond dispute is the queasy postwar respect in Germany and Austria for Pabst as an artist who 'held out in the homeland in dark times'. Posterity edits out his shame.
Indian Express
6 days ago
- General
- Indian Express
The Kennedy curse: The tragedy of America's royal family
On this day 26 years ago, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren vanished into the Atlantic Ocean, capping the 20th century with one more tragedy for the Kennedy family. John Jr.'s death was particularly cruel in its irony. The boy who had captured America's heart as a three-year-old saluting his father's coffin died piloting a plane into the dark waters off Martha's Vineyard. He was heading to a wedding – a celebration that soon became a wake. In less than a century, the Kennedys have lived through more public misfortune, scandal, and sudden death than seems plausible for any one family. Plane crashes. Assassinations. Overdoses. Suicides. Their story, full of promise and pain, is one America cannot stop telling. In 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy – who had already lost four siblings by then – asked aloud whether 'some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.' Fifty-five years later, that question still lingers. The Kennedy saga begins with Joseph Kennedy Sr., a wealthy businessman who dreamed of political greatness for his children. His eldest son, Joseph Kennedy Jr., was the golden child, groomed to become America's first Catholic president. A Harvard graduate and Navy pilot, Joe Jr. volunteered for a dangerous World War II mission in 1944, piloting a bomb-laden plane over Nazi-occupied France. The plane exploded, killing him at the age of 29. 'Now the burden falls on me,' his younger brother John F. Kennedy told a friend, as the family's political hopes shifted to the sickly second son. That burden would define the rest of his life. John was not supposed to be president. He suffered from a chronic illness, lived much of his childhood in hospitals, and was given the last rites more than once. But he was also fiercely resilient. The historian Robert Dallek described Kennedy's decision to hide his condition from the public as 'the quiet stoicism of a man struggling to endure extraordinary pain and distress and performing his presidential (and pre-presidential) duties largely undeterred.' John made it to the White House as the youngest President in American history. A little over one thousand days later, he became the youngest President to die. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was travelling through Dallas, Texas in an open air car with his wife Jacqueline, Texas governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie, when he was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine. The images are seared into American memory: Jackie's pink suit stained with blood, the frantic rush to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the nation watching in stunned silence as Walter Cronkite announced that the President was dead. Five years later, history struck again with cruel precision. In 1968, third son and Presidential hopeful, Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just after winning the California primary. His wife, Ethel, pregnant with their eleventh child, watched as he collapsed to the ground. He died the next day. Joe, John and Robert are perhaps the most famous of the Kennedys to succumb to early and shocking deaths, but they are far from the only ones. Kathleen Kennedy, Joe's daughter, lost her husband in World War II, then died herself in a plane crash four years later. John and Jackie lost two children in infancy—one in 1956 and another in 1963. Robert's son David died of a drug overdose in 1984. Another son, Michael, died in a skiing accident in 1997. More recently, the deaths have come in cruel succession: Kara Kennedy (heart attack), Mary Kennedy (suicide), Saoirse Kennedy Hill (overdose), Maeve Kennedy McKean and her young son (drowned during a canoe trip). Each death has its own story. Each has added to the myth. To some, the Kennedy curse has a point of origin. In 1941, Joe Sr.'s daughter Rosemary, whose mood swings and rumoured scandals threatened the family's image, was subjected to a lobotomy at her father's insistence. The procedure went horribly wrong, leaving her with the intellectual capabilities of a 2-year-old, unable to walk or talk. Rosemary spent decades in private institutions, hidden from public view. For those who believe in curses, this act—an ambitious father silencing his daughter to protect his legacy—is the Kennedy family's original sin. Others look to Joe Sr.'s financial dealings and wartime flirtations with fascist regimes. Still others believe the curse stems from the family's unrelenting pursuit of power, at whatever cost. But maybe it isn't a curse at all. 'Virtually every family has its own silent tragedy. Large families are likely to have a larger number of tragedies. Highly publicized families have more highly publicized tragedies,' Theodore C. Sorensen wrote in the New York Times after John Jr.'s death. With Joe Sr.'s nine children producing 29 grandchildren—Robert alone had 11—the Kennedys' size makes their losses statistically less surprising. Others point to recklessness. 'They fly their own single-engine planes when they could afford a crew of airmen. They ski without poles on the hardest hills of Aspen on the last run of a December afternoon. They coax their way into the military in hopes of facing combat. It is and always has been the Kennedy way,' Boston Globe reporter Brian McGrory wrote in 1999 There is another theory, one rarely explored by the family themselves. In Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, journalist Maureen Callahan argues that the curse is not myth or misfortune – it's misogyny. Across generations, Kennedy women and the women who married into the family have faced early death, psychological torment, and silence. 'Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her,' she writes, 'the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault.' In some ways, the Kennedys are not unique. In India, the Nehru-Gandhi family has endured three major assassinations. In Pakistan, the Bhuttos, father and daughter, both died violently. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was murdered along with most of his family. Around the world, political dynasties often end in blood. Ultimately, the Kennedys faced their own share of joy and sadness. And while they have undoubtably suffered devastating loss, as Sorensen writes, 'they have also been endowed with good genes, good brains, good looks, good health and good fortune, with both instincts and opportunities for serving their country and helping those who are less fortunate.'
Sky News AU
7 days ago
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Former Home Affairs chief Mike Pezzullo tears into Albanese's 'unoriginal' tribute to John Curtin in 'mythical' portrait of legendary PM
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's recent portrait of John Curtin was an unoriginal and mythic repetition of the Curtin tropes. He painted Curtin as a canonised Labor hero who locked horns with Churchill over the return of Australian troops from the Middle East, and who maintained a ceaseless vigil as those troops made their way home by sea. Somehow this was a declaration of independence, when Australia, supposedly for the first time, thought and acted for itself. Never mind Alfred Deakin building our own navy before World War I, or Billy Hughes pursuing our security interests after that war at the Paris Peace Conference. The real Curtin was a courageous political leader who, after being appointed Prime Minister in October 1941, did his best to mobilise the Australian people for the coming war in the Pacific. In December 1941, he famously turned to the US. He had little choice but to appeal desperately for US military assistance, as Australia could not defend itself, and could not rely upon Britain, which was fighting for its life against Nazi Germany. Curtin knew that Australia would be a crucial base for future US operations against Imperial Japan. First, however, Australia would have to be defended. In early 1942, he and Churchill had a disagreement over the disposition of Australian forces. Curtin wanted them to return home; Churchill wanted them sent to Burma. The resultant flurry of cables between the two was a minor dance of allies arguing over war strategy. Churchill and Roosevelt had far more serious arguments, especially over the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1944, as James Curran showed in Curtin's Empire (2011), after the danger to Australia had passed, Curtin tried to resuscitate the idea of 'imperial defence', whereby Britain and its self-governing British dominions would better coordinate their defence strategies and foreign policies. Curtin turned back to the British Empire, which is surely an inconvenient blindspot in the mythic origin story of an 'independent' Australian foreign policy. Forget such myths. A grittier and unsanctified version of Curtin would serve us better today. Indeed, that Curtin would be a leader for these dark days. With a largeness of mind and a strength of character, the Curtin of history grasped the terrible reality that global circumstances did not suit his agenda of socialistic reform. Instead, he had to focus on questions of war. After he became Leader of the Opposition in 1935, Curtin recognised that he would have to champion what was, for him and his party, an unnatural cause – namely, how best to independently defend Australia, at a time when the prevailing orthodoxy was to rely on Britain, and its naval base in Singapore. Had Curtin won the elections of 1937 and 1940, Australia would have been better prepared. The national panic of 1941-42 might have been avoided. Australia might have even re-armed in time to be able to deploy a powerful force in its sea-air approaches to confront Imperial Japan's southwards thrust. Perhaps, Australia might have 'looked to America' sooner - but demanding the final say in its own local defence. Those who would seek to appropriate Curtin's legacy should not be allowed to admire only what he did as a wartime leader. To honour him properly, we have to ask what a modern-day Curtin would do in the face of a looming war. While working tirelessly for peace through diplomacy, Curtin today would be vocal about the threat posed by China. He would argue for greater defence self-reliance and dramatically increased defence spending. He would be concerned about the threat of missile and air attack, offensive cyber strikes, raids in remote areas, attacks on shipping, and so on. He would be deeply engaged with his professional advisers on how best to deal with these military problems. He would show a deep interest in complex matters of war. He would recognise that, in a new 'look to America', ANZUS would need to become a warfighting alliance, with a standing headquarters (but this time headed by an Australian). He would authorise the development of war plans, including jointly with the United States. He would ask to see those war plans, and to approve them. He would also give priority to home defence, mobilisation, defence production, and the introduction of national service. The problem with meeting our heroes is that they always disappoint us. Meeting the real Curtin – the one who was focused on technical military issues, even if that meant setting aside a socialistic reforming zeal – would disappoint the Prime Minister. That, however, is the Curtin that we need today. The Curtin who in the 1930s was concerned that Australia was not doing enough to get ready, and who would today be deeply concerned to see history repeating itself. Michael Pezzullo was the Home Affairs Secretary from December 2017 until November 2023.
Time Out
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
This hard-to-find war movie classic is streaming on YouTube
The streaming era has made untold thousands of movies available at our fingertips. The problem? The vast majority of those movies were made in only the last two decades or so. If you're a burgeoning cinephile looking to continue your film education, finding films from earlier than the Clinton administration is more difficult than it should be. But it's not impossible: you just need to know where to look. A good place to start? YouTube. The site best known for cat videos, conspiracy theories and DIY home repair tutorials is a semi-secret repository for movies unavailable on other platforms. Many classics of the cult, arthouse and international variety are out there to stream, completely for free. Of course, the drawbacks are dodgy transfers and possible copyright violations. But if you want to watch one of the greatest anti-war films of all-time, well, it's there, it's in 1080p, and it's legal. Be forewarned, though: 1985's Come and See will leave you absolutely shell-shocked. Set in Nazi-occupied Belarus, the final film by Soviet director Elem Klimov follows a young soldier named Florya as he witnesses horrors beyond his comprehension. Time Out – which has not only named the movie one of the best war movies of all-time but one of the greatest overall – put it this way: 'As unsparing as cinema gets, the influence of Elem Klimov's sui generis war movie transcends the genre in a way that not even Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan can match. At its heart it's a coming-of-age story that follows a young Belarusian boy (Aleksei Kravchenko) through unspeakable horror as Nazi death squads visit an apocalypse on his region. Alongside its historical truths, the film's grammar and visual language – there are passages that play like an ultra-violent acid trip – are what truly elevates it. Like an Hieronymus Bosch masterpiece, the images here can never be unseen.' Currently, Come and See is not free to stream anywhere else in the US. It's on YouTube thanks to Mosfilm, the century-old Russian studio that has produced many of the country's most renowned films. Beginning in 2011, the studio began uploading a trove of Russian films to its YouTube channel, in high-def and with English subtitles. In addition to Come and See, the page channel has nearly full filmographies from legendary directors like Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky – so you'll have a lot more to dig into, once you're done being traumatised.
