In 1944, U.S. POWs Got the Best X-Mas Gift of All—An Escape Map (2024)

Across the globe, World War II’s battles were powerfully visible and intense by the end of 1944. As Allied and Axis powers struggled to create two diametrically opposed futures, the most prominent of conflicts grabbed headlines and, later, filled history books. But other fights, ones just as important, were of a more clandestine nature.

Colditz Castle, a Renaissance-style castle turned WWII prison located in the Saxony region of Germany, contained one of those key fights. The Germans placed the most high-profile WWII POWs—the ones difficult to control or prone to break out—at Colditz. Because of the Geneva Convention, organizations like the Red Cross could deliver Christmas care packages to POWs. What the German Army saw as a harmless distraction for prisoners, Allied spies saw as an opportunity.

To pull off massive prisoner escapes from Colditz—and across other prisons throughout Europe—the American Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA) and the British Special Operations Executive agency turned to an unlikely ally—The United States Playing Card Company.

A Plan Forms

In World War II, pilots were everything.

“One of the most precious commodities in various parts of the war were pilots,” says Andrew Hammond historian and curator at the International Spy Museum and seven-year veteran of Britain’s Royal Air Force and British Army G2 Intelligence Unit. “It could cost a lot to train them and they were really short of pilots. It was important when they were shot down to try to get them back home.”

Hammond believes that the American Office for Strategic Services and the British Special Operations Executive agency, the saboteurs and commandos behind German lines trying to create havoc, worked together to gather intelligence. MI9, the now-defunct British agency focused on escape and evasion, and the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Service-X (MIS-X) program were also working on the project.

While MI9 may have been one of the main groups behind the genesis of the idea of getting “important personnel back up in planes and in bombers to defend Britain,” it was a fully joint operation that required the help of the U.S. Playing Card Company and its Bicycle brand.

Before being sent on a mission, pilots were likely told that an unlikely memento from home could be the difference between life and death if they were ever captured.

“They would be alerted to the fact,” Hammond says. “In intelligence and espionage, it is only helpful if people know it exists. I don’t think they would have just left it to chance.”

What's in a Card?

Your standard playing card is made by joining two layers of paper, laminated, and then glued. What was sent to POWs, though, was anything but standard. When water was applied to these special POW cards, the layers peeled away to reveal a piece of a map of escape routes in Germany. Place the deck together and prisoners had an entire map of their German region, along with micro-maps and other tips.

Not every care package had the special decks, called "map decks," and Hammond says the loaded decks were marked by the cellophane seal intentionally applied crooked so they “would know it was the doctored one.”

The decks came in a white and blue box with the signature Bicycle logo and card back design in blue and white. Along with a map of surrounding areas, complete with latitudes and longitudes, the map included different instructions. With the maps sent to specific POW camps, there were likely regional variations, such as the Colditz Castle version helping soldiers navigate through Saxony.

The map was embedded in 48 of the playing cards with the four Aces featuring individual micro-maps with details about rivers or roads. The Joker cards were used as the map assembly key to bring it all together. The escape map deck required POWs to lay out the entirety of Spades before switching colors to Diamonds and then moving on to Clubs and Hearts.

“You started from the top left and kept adding them up,” Hammond says, “starting with the next (suit).”

In one instance for a southern Germany map, instructions told POWs that “escapes into Switzerland have the great chance of success if attempted across the frontier of the Canton of Schaffhausen,” while instructing escapees to avoid the Lake Constance region.

Specific instructions included looking for overland electric cables in certain areas and finding specific 70-foot-high pylons, made of steel and carrying seven electric cables as a key identifier from Waldshut to Ravensburg. Instructions highlight hills for viewpoints, fields that must be crossed carefully, and riverbanks that are ideal to follow.

Special Delivery

While the map deck may have been part of the special Red Cross Christmas package, MIS-X was sending up to 100 care packages daily from its secret PO Box 1142 location at Fort Hunt in Alexandria, Virginia, a National Park Service site the Army took over during World War II. Additional decks of cards likely were included in these “loaded” packs. MI9 was also sending packages from London addresses that no longer existed because of the bombing.

At least 32 prisoners used the map to escape from Colditz Castle and the thousands of decks distributed likely led to over 300 additional escape attempts around Germany.

“I believe they were used for a variety of different escapes,” says Hammond. “Colditz Castle is the most high-profile one. There was quite a significant breakout from the deck of cards. Anywhere you found some successful escape, there is a decent chance these decks were involved.”

The map deck effort was kept as secret as possible during the war to avoid German detection. Because the map deck was a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the effort was held as top secret for decades following the war, not coming to the light until the 1970s.

“In the world of intelligence and espionage, it is a mosaic that some things get slowly revealed over time and there are always parts you can’t properly see,” Hammond says. “There are no clear numbers on how many were printed, how many went into (Germany), and how many escapes were because of the cards. There are just things we don’t know.”

The U.S. Playing Card Company says it doesn’t have detailed archival information on the cards because of the top-secret nature of the operation, but a spokesperson did call the effort “one of the more interesting projects in our long history.”

Hammond doesn’t know if the Germans ever put the map deck puzzle together and confiscated any decks, but in the context of World War II, he wouldn’t be surprised if, despite the likelihood that a growing number of people knew about the decks, the Germans never caught wind of it because there were so many regular decks also entering camps.

“Maybe back then you could have gotten away with it long enough,” he says.

The Last Living Deck

The International Spy Museum, located in Washington, D.C., has the only known surviving deck of cards in their collection. Along with a complete, sealed deck, the museum also has a dissected Six of Clubs revealing part of the map hidden inside.

The artifacts came to the Spy Museum’s display after spending time in the CIA Museum, only accessible to those who can get into headquarters at Langley, “which isn’t your average person,” Hammond points out. “It is great having all of this wonderful stuff, but if nobody can see it, it isn’t quite as good.”

Despite lacking some details regarding the project, the company created a limited-edition reproduction in April 1990 and, in 2013, created a modern-day Commemorative Bicycle Escape Map Deck with original artwork included.

In the commemorative deck, a replica of a map is printed on the face of the cards, rather than forcing consumers to peel the cards away, allowing owners of the modern decks to lay out the map just as it was in 1944, according to Hammond.

The map proves easy enough to see in the commemorative version, a far cry from the secrecy that shrouded the escape map decks during World War II.