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New York Post
18 minutes 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.'
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Stay mad.' Amid immigration raids, Epstein rumors, Trump team ramps up its trolling
Morgan Weistling, an accomplished painter of cowboys and Old West frontier life, was vacationing with his family this month when he got a surprising message from a friend about one of his works of art. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, he said the friend told him, had posted a work he had painted five years ago to its official social media channels without his knowledge. The painting, which looks like a scene from the Oregon Trail, depicts a young white couple — she in a long dress, he in a cowboy hat — cradling a baby in a covered wagon, with mountains and another wagon in the background. 'Remember your Homeland's Heritage,' the Department of Homeland Security captioned the July 14 post on X, Instagram and Facebook. Exactly whose homeland and whose heritage? And what was the intended message of the federal department, whose masked and heavily armed agents have arrested thousands of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking immigrants — most with no criminal convictions — in California this summer? That has been the source of heated online debate at a time when the Trump administration has ramped up its online trolling with memes and jokes about the raids that critics have called racist, childish and unbefitting official government social media accounts. The 'Remember your Homeland's Heritage' post racked up 19 million views on X and thousands of responses. Critics compared the post to Nazi propaganda. Supporters said it was 'OK to be white' and to celebrate 'traditional values.' Among the responses: 'You mean the heritage built on stolen land, Indigenous genocide, and whitewashed history? You don't get to romanticize settlers while caging today's migrants.' And: 'A few minutes later, an ICE wagon pulls up next to them, agents cuff and stuff them into the back and then summarily send them back to Ireland.' Another person, referencing the 'Oregon Trail' video game, joked: 'All three died from dysentery.' Asked about criticism of the post, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to The Times: 'If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails, forded the rivers, and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook. This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage. Get used to it.' On July 11, a federal judge temporarily halted indiscriminate immigration sweeps in Southern California at places such as Home Depot, car washes and rows of street vendors. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said she found sufficient evidence that agents were unlawfully using race, ethnicity, language, accent, location or employment as a pretext for immigration enforcement. The next week, the Department of Homeland Security — which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement along with Customs and Border Protection — posted the white-people-in-the-covered-wagon painting. It also posted a meme with a fake poster from the 1982 movie 'E.T. The Extra Terrestrial' with the caption: 'Illegal aliens, take a page from E.T. and PHONE HOME.' Ramesh Srinivasan, founder of the University of California Digital Cultures Lab, which studies the connections between technology, politics and culture, said the mean-spirited posts and gleeful deportation jokes are part of a deliberate trolling campaign by the Trump administration. 'The saddest part of all of this is it mirrors how DHS is acting in real life,' he said. 'Someone can be a troll online but may not be as much [of one] in real life,' he said. 'The digital world and physical world may not be completely in lockstep with each other. But in this particular case, there's a level of honesty that's actually disturbing.' Srinivasan, who is Indian American, said that although the covered wagon painting is not offensive in and of itself, the timing of the Homeland Security post raises questions about the government's intended meaning. The painting, he said, 'is being used to show inclusion and exclusion, who's worthy of being an American and who isn't.' Srinivasan said mean memes are effective because they spread quickly in a media environment in which people are flooded with information and quickly scroll through visual content and short video reels with little context. 'There are hidden algorithms that determine visibility and virality,' Srinivasan said. 'Outrage goes more viral because it generates what tech companies call engagement.' Here in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken a page from Trump's troll playbook, with recent social media posts that include name-calling, swear words, and, of course, memes. Earlier this month, Newsom responded to a post on X by the far-right Libs of TikTok account that showed video of someone apparently firing a gun at immigration officers in Camarillo. The account asked if the governor would condemn the shooting. Newsom wrote: 'Of course I condemn any assault on law enforcement, you shit poster. Now do Jan 6.' In a post on X, Newsom's press office called White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of many of Trump's hard-line immigration policies, a 'fascist cuck.' Newsom defended the name-calling in a news conference, saying of the Trump administration: 'I don't think they understand any other kind of language.' The term is used in far right circles to insult liberals as weak. It is also short for 'cuckold,' the husband of an unfaithful wife. Even for Team Trump, which is adept at distraction, the heightened online efforts to own the libs, as supporters say, come at a precarious time for the president. He has been embroiled in controversies over rumors about his friendship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the effects of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut Medicaid and food assistance programs while funding the planned hiring of thousands of new immigration agents. Still, his meme teams are working hard to stoke outrage and brag about immigration raids. Earlier this month, Homeland Security posted a slickly edited video on its social media accounts showing border agents at work, with a narrator quoting the Bible verse Isaiah 6:8: 'Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me.'' The video uses a cover of the song, 'God's Gonna Cut You Down' by the San Francisco rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. On Instagram, the band wrote: 'It has come to our attention that the Department of Homeland Security is improperly using our recording of 'God's Gonna Cut You Down' in your latest propaganda video. It's obvious that you don't respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution.' On July 10, the band asked the government to cease and desist the use of its recording and pull down the video. It added, 'Oh, and go f— yourselves.' As of Friday evening, the video remained posted on X along with the song. In recent days, White House and Homeland Security social media accounts have shared memes that include: A coffee mug with the words 'Fire up the deportation planes;' a weightlifting skeleton declaring, 'My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations;' and alligators wearing ICE caps in reference to the officially named Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention facility in Florida. A meme shared last week depicted a poster outside the White House that read: 'oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHiS?' The caption: 'Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can't post banger memes.' The White House also shared the Homeland Security covered wagon post. In response to questions about online criticism that calls the posts racist, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson asked a Times reporter in an email to 'explain how deporting illegal aliens is racist.' She also said in a statement: 'We won't stop celebrating the Trump Administration's many wins via banger memes on social media. Stay mad.' Weistling, the artist unwittingly caught up in the controversy, apparently was surprised not only by the posting of his painting and his name, but also by the Department of Homeland Security using an incorrect title for the artwork. The government labeled the painting: 'New Life in a New Land — Morgan Weistling.' The actual title of the painting is 'A Prayer for a New Life.' Prints are listed for sale on the website for the evangelical nonprofit Focus on the Family. Weistling, a registered Republican who lives in Los Angeles County, could not be reached for comment. Shortly after the government used his painting, he wrote on his website: 'Attention! I did not give the DHS permission to use my painting in their recent postings on their official web platforms. They used a painting I did 5 years ago and re-titled it and posted it without my permission. It is a violation of my copyright on the painting. It was a surprise to me and I am trying to gather how this happen [sic] and what to do next.' He later shortened the statement on his website and deleted posts on his Instagram and Facebook accounts saying he learned about the post while on vacation and was stunned the government 'thought they could randomly post an artist's painting without permission' and re-title it. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions from The Times about copyright issues. But a spokesman said the posting of an incorrect title was 'an honest mistake.'
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
R.I. city reaches $300,000 settlement in lawsuit filed by Jewish employee, slapped in face as part of ‘Nazi joke'
Advertisement 'We are not commenting on the settlement at this time,' Tufts wrote. Broomfield is no longer employed by the city, according to Tufts. Records show the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice on July 11 in US District Court in Providence. Get Rhode Island News Alerts Sign up to get breaking news and interesting stories from Rhode Island in your inbox each weekday. Enter Email Sign Up An attorney representing Broomfield did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday. The settlement comes months after Officials reached Advertisement Filed in October 2024, Broomfield's lawsuit describes an 'unlawful, hostile work environment.' A police report states DiPetrillo asked Broomfield to stand up and said, 'Knock, knock.' As Broomfield responded, DiPetrillo struck him in the face with an open hand, saying 'something to the effect of 'I'm a Nazi and I get to ask the questions.'' DiPetrillo explained to authorities he and other employees had been discussing an episode of the TV series 'The Office' that included 'The sound of the slap was audible,' the lawsuit states. Afterwards, DePetrillo 'burst out laughing hysterically' as others looked on 'in utter shock,' the complaint states. Broomfield 'was mortified, humiliated, and offended, as well as in pain and shock from the physical assault,' according to the lawsuit. The slap 'was very hard and left a big red mark' on Broomfield's face, the lawsuit states. 'This 'joke' was subjectively and objectively offensive,' and it was 'degrading' because Broomfield is of Jewish descent, according to the complaint. Broomfield subsequently asked the city for a transfer, but was told that was not possible, the lawsuit states. Broomfield was also told if he did not return to work, he would be considered on 'workman's comp.' He remained out of work while waiting for 'an alternate job and/or transfer' — just a 'few short years' from becoming vested in the 10-year pension level 'which means his effective termination has lost him hundreds of thousands of dollars of pension money,' the lawsuit states. The lawsuit sought to provide Broomfield back pay and compensation for 'mental anguish.' Advertisement Material from previous Globe stories was used in this report. Christopher Gavin can be reached at
