Just before the start of the war the 8th Chess Olympiad, the global gathering of chess champions, was held in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Always about more than chess, it opened on 23 August 1939, the Austrian team playing under the Nazi flag while Czechoslovakia played under the team name of Bohemia & Moravia, the name given to the ‘protectorate’ annexed by the Germans. Following the declaration of war on 3 September 1939, the Olympiad became highly political, the British team withdrawing from the contest and returning home. The French team also displayed its displeasure by refusing to play the Germans, so the score was marked as a 2–2 draw. After many other teams had withdrawn, Germany eventually won the Chess Olympiad, securing victory during the last game. Poland was a half-point behind taking second place while Estonia came in third. However, it was a pyrrhic victory for the Nazis as all five members of the German team, Eliskases, Michel, Engels, Becker and Reinhardt, chose not to return to Germany and sought asylum abroad as did most of the Jewish players in Nazi-annexed countries.10
One of the oldest games in the world, chess began life in India in the sixth century as a military game where the pieces included elephants and chariots. By the start of the Second World War chess was hugely popular across the world, the game continuing to be played by all sides throughout the conflict. In particular, prisoners of war spent many hours playing the game in camps. A set was even made from rye bread by a prisoner at Auschwitz concentration camp for an SS guard, the king piece on the brown German side being crafted to resemble Hitler. However, the normal game was not sufficiently militarised for the Nazis so in 1938 they brought out their own version and called it Wehrschach Tak-Tik or Tak-Tik for short.
The Nazis brought out their own version of chess in 1938 and called it Wehrschach Tak-Tik or for short Tak-Tik. With the advent of war the game proved very popular with German troops.
Tak-Tik was played on a chess like board with 11×11 squares with eighteen blue and red pieces which were made of synthetic plastic or later in the war wood. The pieces were designed to be representative of the German armed forces so children and adults could literally play war games. The figures were given the titles Infanterie, Panzer-kampfwagen, Artillerie, Jagdflieger, Kampfflieger and Hauptfigur (infantry, tank, antiaircraft artillery, fighter pilot, combat pilot and the Nazi head of state). All the figures resembled their roles, the Hauptfigur and Jagdflieger figures being represented symbolically by the Nazi eagle and a winged human respectively.
The pieces were designed to be representative of the German armed forces and the Nazi state so people could play war games.
The board was divided by diagonal lines representing a main road and river, two horizontal lines representing walls and two squares representing lakes which blocked all movement except for the planes. The game had a set of rules even more complex than chess, with additional rules for each of the different figures. There were several ways to win Tak-Tik including capturing the head of state or Hauptfigur, destroying all the enemy’s infantry, knocking out the enemy’s forces by leaving five or less pieces on the board or occupying the enemy’s homeland. However, unlike in chess, two or more pieces were needed to knock out an enemy playing piece.
Tak-Tik was heavily advertised before the war, appearing in the magazine Die Wehrmacht No. 11 in 1938, it then regularly publishing Wehrschach problems and solutions, rather like a chess column. It was also advertised in youth publications like the April 1938 edition of Hilf mit! Illustrierte Deutsche Schülerzeitung (Help out! Illustrated German Pupils’ Magazine). With the advent of war, the game proved very popular with German troops, a variety of manufacturers bringing out versions aimed at the military and civilian populations.
Although the Germans had won the 8th Chess Olympiad, when it came to the war the game of chess was not spared their wrath. In September 1939, the National Chess Centre was opened in London, membership increasing to over 700 members in the first year of the war despite blackouts and rationing. The centre was managed by the women’s world champion Vera Menchik Stevenson (1906–1944), a Russian-born British–Czech master (she won the first Women’s World Championship in 1927 and successfully defended her title six times in every championship held during her lifetime, losing only one game, winning seventy-eight and drawing four). The National Chess Centre boasted a ‘large and well-appointed Air Raid Shelter’ on the premises, which was just as well as on 23 September 1940, the centre was burnt to the ground during the London Blitz. Despite this attack on the very heart of the game, chess proved a very popular pastime to while away the hours spent in air-raid shelters and undoubtedly helped keep up British morale during the darkest days of the war.
In 1941, the Red Cross issued an appeal for chess sets for wounded men in convalescent homes and British prisoners of war in Germany. However, the British government at home remained suspicious of the game, censors searching thousands of letters for any discussions of chess moves in case fifth columnists were using them to hide codes. In London the game of chess received another severe blow when on 26 June 1944 Vera Menchik Stevenson, her sister and mother all died after aV-1 flying bomb hit their home in Clapham.11 However, it was the British who eventually checkmated the Germans after recruiting chess masters to become code breakers. The Government Code and Cypher School, also known as the Gold, Cheese and Chess Society, employed three masters under Alan Turing (1912–1954) at Bletchley Park: Harry Golombek, Stuart Milner-Berry and Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander were all chess champions who were on the team which broke the German’s Enigma code, one of the most decisive moves of the war.