A letter from MI9 to Monopoly publisher Waddingtons.
There are few households that don’t own a copy of Monopoly and its popularity is exactly what led to it being used by the British Military Intelligence (MI9) as a tool to help prisoners of war escape during the Second World War. Approximately 35,000 British and Allied servicemen escaped from prisoner of war camps in Nazi-occupied Europe and roughly half of this number did so using secret ‘escape and evasion’ maps.
Boredom was a major problem in POW camps and the German officers knew that bored soldiers in captivity were far more troublesome. They allowed some recreation time for their prisoners to listen to music and play games, which came in parcels delivered by aid agencies from the UK. These were carefully searched before they were handed over, but the resistance, in conjunction with British Intelligence, had a plan to get secret messages and escape maps through to the prisoners.