How This Children’s Game Helped Thousands of Men Escape Nazi Prison Camps

An ordinary board game. Streets, little houses, colorful paper money. The kind almost every family had in the 1940s. But some of these boxes had one tiny extra detail — a small red dot on the Free Parking square.

Because these games were never meant for children.

Lift the board, and there’s a map printed on silk, showing the way out of a Nazi prison camp. A compass. Steel files sharp enough to cut through bars. And hidden in the stack of toy money — real money. And the Germans handed these games to the prisoners themselves.

The man behind it was Christopher Clayton Hutton — a British inventor who, as a young man, had once been fooled by Harry Houdini. During World War II, he joined MI9, Britain’s secret escape department, and turned everyday objects into escape tools: compasses that unscrew the wrong way, maps on silk, records full of hidden cash — and a board game made in a secret room in Leeds.

The parcels came from charities that didn’t exist. The orders came in coded letters home. And at Colditz, the most famous prison camp of the war, the prisoners learned to look inside everything they were sent.

So how many men escaped because of a board game? Nobody knows. And that’s not an accident.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 – A Game Never Meant for Children
1:20 – The Rigged Box
5:04 – The Enemy’s Instruction Manual
8:59 – Every Idea Had the Same Flaw
12:40 – The Secret Room in Leeds
16:50 – The Ghost Charities
20:35 – Letters Home
23:33 – Colditz
27:43 – No Longer a Sport

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

1. The National Archives (UK) — Escaping Colditz: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/explore-by-time-period/second-world-war/escaping-colditz/
2. The National Archives (UK) — Roger Bushell and the Great Escape: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/roger-bushell-and-the-great-escape/
3. ABC News (18.09.2009) — Monopoly’s hidden maps helped WWII POWs escape: https://abcnews.com/amp/Technology/monopolys-hidden-maps-wwii-pows-escape/story?id=8605905
4. Mental Floss — How a brilliant intelligence officer used Monopoly to free WWII POWs: https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/world-war-ii/how-brilliant-intelligence-officer-used-monopoly-free-wwii-pows
5. NPR (04.05.2013) — World War II code is broken decades after POW used it: https://www.kunc.org/npr-news/2013-05-04/world-war-ii-code-is-broken-decades-after-pow-used-it
6. Leeds Museums and Galleries (MyLearning) — How Leeds-made Monopoly helped POWs escape in WW2: https://mylearning.org/stories/how-leeds-made-monopoly-helped-pows-escape-in-ww2
7. Atlas Obscura — The WWII silk escape maps: https://atlasobscura.com/articles/wwii-silk-maps-clothes
8. Snopes — War Games (Monopoly escape kits fact-check): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/war-games-3/
9. Clayton Hutton — Official Secret (1960)
10. Mary Pilon — The Monopolists (2015)