As he gently spread the layers of cardboard of the package, he found two slivers of metal which screwed together to form a file. He broke the little wooden red hotel to find a tiny silk map of his region folded very tightly. Under the packaged Monopoly money was real German Reich marks ready to spend and, finally, inside the Scotty dog was a tiny compass. Here was what he needed to be among the estimated 35,000 Allied POWs who escaped from German and Italian camps during WWII. The contraband in the Monopoly games is credited with at least one third of them

During WWII, it is estimated that there were 135,000 British (50,000 from Dunkirk alone) and 95,532 US Prisoners of War held by Germany. By 1945 American and British POWs were mostly concentrated in about a dozen camps of several thousand each. Hitler, earlier, had decreed that all American and British prisoners were to be held at least 1000 miles from the English Channel. In order to make successful escapes as difficult as possible, Germans located the camps as far east as possible.

As luck would have it, 'games and pastimes' was a category allowed into packages sent by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war. To help prisoners escape, in 1941, the British

There were several problems here. Maps were fragile and noisy when opened or closed. MI-5 came up with the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It is durable, can be folded-up into tiny spaces, and unfolded as many times as needed – all silently. At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk and that was John Waddington, Ltd. They were already printing silk maps for British and American air crews. They now started printing silk maps to be hidden inside Monopoly games. When processed, these maps were folded small enough to fit inside a Monopoly playing piece. Also, under the fake money was real French, German and Italian currency. Secret devices like files and compasses were also disguised as game pieces. Waddington's also managed to add a playing token containing a small magnetic compass and a two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together.

Tokens
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