Monopoly Games for POWs

Allied airmen downed over enemy territory and held as prisoners by the Third Reich had help escaping from an unusual source. Germany allowed humanitarian groups, such as the Red Cross, to give care packages to the prisoners. One category of items permitted in the packages was “games and pastimes.”
Taking advantage of this situation, the Allies sent packages to their POWs featuring clandestine escape kits, including compasses, metal files, money, and maps. Of course, maps needed to show, in addition to the usual, locations of safe houses where an escaped POW could receive food and shelter. Paper maps make too much noise when you open and fold them, wear out rapidly, and get ruined if they get wet. So someone in MI-9 came up with the idea of printing maps on silk, a perfect solution.
Great Britain had only one manufacturer that had perfected the technology of printing on silk: John Waddington, Ltd. Waddington happened to be Britain’s licensee for the American board game, Monopoly. In a securely guarded old workshop at Waddington’s, a group of employees began producing maps keyed to each region of Germany or Italy that had Allied POW camps. When finished, the maps could be folded into such tiny pieces that they would fit inside a Monopoly playing piece. C. W. Clayton Hutton, a soldier, airman, journalist and inventor who worked for MI-9, is credited with the plan to create and distribute the escape aids.
Waddington’s workers also added a playing token with a magnetic compass, a two-part metal file that could be screwed together, and some German, Italian, and French currency mixed into the piles of Monopoly money. “It was ingenious,” according to Philip Orbane, author of several books on Monopoly. “The Monopoly box was big enough to not only hold the game but hide everything else they needed to get to POWs.” 
Before taking off on their first mission, British and American air crews were schooled in identifying a rigged Monopoly set: they had to look for a tiny red dot, which appeared as an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the “free parking square.”
Once prisoners got the playing pieces, they were supposed to destroy the games to keep the ruse a secret from the Axis. British historians estimate that the Monopoly boards could have helped thousands of captured soldiers escape from prison camps. Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWs who escaped, approximately 20,000 were aided by the Monopoly games. Everyone who escaped was sworn to secrecy indefinitely. Chess sets also included messages, currency, and maps to help POWS as did decks of cards.
Waddington’s role in providing the rigged games stayed classified until 2007, when the surviving Waddington workers, as well as the firm, were honored in a public ceremony.