For sale: Stalag watch

A mail order watch bought by a British prisoner of war and delivered to him in the Nazis’ notorious Stalag Luft III camp is expected to fetch more than £66,000 at auction tomorrow.

The story of the elegant Rolex watch ordered in 1943 by Corporal Clive James Nutting casts light on an extraordinary commercial enterprise that defied the disruption of war.

The camp, in what is now Zagan, Poland, was made famous by the 1963 film The Great Escape, which told the story of an imaginative but ultimately ill-fated breakout.

Corporal Nutting helped to organise the escape and later advised the film-makers. He ordered the stainless steel Rolex Oyster 3525 Chronograph, which cost the equivalent of £1,200, directly from the founder of Rolex, Hans Wilsdorf, in Geneva in 1943.

Mr Wilsdorf, a German, immediately arranged for the timepiece to be sent to the camp and, in a letter to Corporal Nutting, even apologised for the possible delay, making it plain that his unlikely customer should not “even think of settlement” until the war was over.

Corporal Nutting eventually paid for the watch in 1948, after his return to London.

However, because of British currency restrictions at the time, he was invoiced for only £15.

His Rolex and the correspondence with Mr Wilsdorf over several years are to be auctioned tomorrow by the Swiss firm Antiquorum at a hotel in Geneva.