SIXTY years ago today, a party of seven Germans and Austrians staged a great escape from a British prisoner-of-war camp in India every bit as daring as anything attempted from Colditz or Stalag Luft III.

On April 29, 1944, at Dehra-Dun, the largest internment camp on the sub-continent, the seven disguised themselves as a barbed-wire repair party. Two dressed as British officers, complete with pith helmets and swagger sticks, and the rest masqueraded as Indian labourers in blacked-up faces and turbans.

Two reached neutral Tibet over 65 mountain passes, another pair reached Tokyo after a journey of thousands of miles through British India and Burma, but the remaining three were recaptured, one in neutral Nepal.

By far the best-known escaper was Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian mountaineer whose epic journey to Lhasa and subsequent role as tutor to the young Dalai Lama is chronicled in his classic autobiography, Seven Years In Tibet.

Dr Harrer, 91, is thought to be the only member of the escape party still alive.

When war broke out in 1939, he was leading an expedition to conquer Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest peak in the world, with the full co-operation of the British authorities in Delhi.

He and other members of his party were interned, but after several unsuccessful escape attempts they were transferred to a much more secure camp and treated as prisoners of war.

In his book, translated into English by Richard Graves, Dr Harrer recalled how, carrying a ladder, realistic-looking blueprints and a stolen coil of wire, they slipped easily through internal fences to reach the main gate.

“We passed out through the gate without causing the guards to bat an eyelid. It was comforting to see them saluting smartly and obviously suspicious of nobody.”

It all happened in the broadest of northern Indian daylight. The escapers made for the bushes, threw off their disguises and ran as fast as they could.

Dr Harrer and his fellow mountaineer and escaper Peter Aufschnaiter reached Tibet on May 17 after a punishing journey through the Himalayas. It took them more than a year to cross the high plateau, largely in sub-zero temperatures, before reaching Lhasa, where Dr Harrer was eventually introduced to the 14-year-old Dalai Lama, instructed him in English and geography and built him a small cinema in the Potala Palace, powered by a Jeep engine.

The British appear to have had a sneaking admiration for the barefaced boldness of the plan. When Dr Harrer came to London in 1953 to be interviewed by Peter Fleming, brother of Ian, for The Times, and to deliver a lecture at the Royal Festival Hall, the former Dehra-Dun camp commander, a Colonel Williams, was in the audience and sent the guest speaker a tongue-in-cheek note backstage: “As commander of your prison camp in India, I had to take the blame for your successful escape from headquarters in New Delhi. But not only that, adding insult to injury, this evening I have had to pay money to hear how you did it.” When Dr Harrer celebrated his 90th birthday in Austria in 2002, both Colonel Williams’s son and the Dalai Lama were among the guests.

Controversy over Dr Harrer’s Nazi past arose in 1997 when Hollywood released a film version of his book, starring Brad Pitt. Dr Harrer had become a national hero in Germany in 1938 for leading the first climbing team to conquer the north face of the Eiger and he was consequently recruited into the SS as a fitness instructor, even marrying in his SS uniform.

When the film appeared, he issued a statement saying that he had been in the SS for barely a year, condemned the Nazi era and its crimes, and denied suggestions that he had been a member of the SA, the thuggish paramilitary wing of the SS. He said that joining the SS had been “a youthful aberration”.

Dr Harrer left Tibet in 1951, soon after the Chinese invasion, and returned to Austria to resume mountaineering — and a lucrative lecture career on his great escape.

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