Escape Cards: The Playing Cards That Hid a Map of Germany for Allied POWs

A deck of Bicycle playing cards in a Red Cross parcel looked like any other: the same white-and-blue design, a box sealed in cellophane. But if the seal was crooked, an Allied prisoner of war knew to look closer. Soaked in water, each card could be peeled apart to reveal a piece of a map of Germany. Laid out in order — spades, diamonds, clubs, hearts, as the jokers explained — the pieces showed escape routes out of the country; other cards told prisoners what places to avoid and what landmarks to watch for.

A secret job for a card company

The idea came from the American Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner of the CIA — and Britain's Special Operations Executive, which asked the United States Playing Card Company (USPCC) to make the decks. Under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross and other charities could send prisoners parcels with clothing, food, medicine, tobacco — and games, such as cards.

The company, in Norwood, Ohio, an enclave of Cincinnati, had already turned much of its production to the war: parachutes for antipersonnel fragmentation bombs, defense materials, and electronics and radar devices for the Navy and Signal Corps. It also printed "spotter decks" showing the silhouettes of other nations' ships, tanks and aircraft, to help civilians tell friend from foe.

Where the cards were needed

Nazi Germany captured and held nearly 94,000 American prisoners of war, in camps across Europe such as Stalag Luft III in western Poland and Oflag IV-C in eastern Germany.

Oflag IV-C was Colditz Castle, a Renaissance castle near Leipzig turned into a prison camp in 1939 for Allied officers who were high-profile or likely to escape — Polish, French, Dutch, British and American. It was reputed to be impossible to escape: the only Nazi camp where guards outnumbered prisoners, on a high rocky hill 400 miles from the nearest Allied forces. Prisoners tried anyway, tunneling through floors and thick stone walls. Counts vary, but there were at least 130 escape attempts, and 32 succeeded. The U.S. Army captured the castle in April 1945 and freed the prisoners still there.

Kept secret, then remembered

The decks stayed secret for years after the war. No one knows how many were made or survived; only two complete decks are known, both at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2013 the company issued a commemorative escape-map deck — with the map pieces printed openly on the card faces. The company moved to a smaller plant in Erlanger, Kentucky, in 2009, and the U.S. Playing Card Company Complex in Norwood joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.

Sources

Based on "Stacking the Deck: Escape Cards of World War II," researched and written by Jade Ryerson, Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education, National Park Service, drawing on the Congressional Research Service, the National Register nomination for the U.S. Playing Card Company Complex, and histories by Helen Fry, Arieh J. Kochavi and Jonathan F. Vance; a work of the United States government in the public domain.