Magener, who had been working for a German company in India, was interned in September 1939 and by April 1944 found himself with 1,500 other foreign nationals at Dehra Dun, near the border with Nepal. Having resolved to escape, Magener and his friend Heins von Have ruled out a direct assault on the 11ft-high perimeter wire, which was guarded at intervals of eight paces by Gurkhas.
They planned instead to get into the one of the alleyways which divided the various sections of the camp and led to an exit where the passes of those going out were never checked. The pair soon discovered, however, that several other prisoners were also planning to escape, among them Harrer, the first man to scale the north face of the Eiger.
In order to avoid compromising each others' attempts, it was decided to organise a mass breakout and on the afternoon of April 29 a group of seven internees cut through the wire into one of the alleys. Magener and von Have, both of whom spoke excellent English, were disguised as British officers (complete with pith helmets and swagger-sticks) in charge of a native wire repairing party (five Germans whose complexions had been darkened with permanganate of potash). The blue-eyed Harrer, clad in a dhoti, balanced a bundle of clothes on his head.
The escapers marched boldly up to the gate, where Magener blithely unrolled a sheet of "plans" in front of the Gurkha sentry before leading the group out of the exit. A heart-stopping minute later, all seven Germans were running hard down a path through the jungle.
Soon after the escape, the group split up. Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, both professional climbers, headed north, the former later recording their adventures as Seven Years in Tibet (1953). They were accompanied part of the way by Hans Kopp, who later wrote Himalayan Shuttlecock.
But Magener and von Have decided to play an even bolder game, striking 1,500 miles south-east across India towards the Japanese lines in Burma. This would necessitate using public transport and, since Europeans stood out among the Indian population, they would also have to keep up their disguise as British soldiers.
Having lain low for a few days, they caught a train to Calcutta, more than 1,000 miles away. Trying to maintain a suitably English reserve, they shared railway compartments and restaurant tables with genuine British officers, keeping conversation to a minimum.
They had several very narrow squeaks with the Military Police. Once, while Magener was shaving, he heard von Have being asked for a pass he did not have. Both were resigned to capture when von Have was saved by a British lieutenant who produced for inspection a pass for his batman, whom the police mistook for von Have.
On reaching Calcutta, the pair decided to live it up for a few days, enjoying gimlets at the Great Eastern Hotel and crab mayonnaise, cold turkey and John Collinses at Firpo's, the top restaurant in the city. But at a visit to the cinema, they almost gave themselves away by walking out during the opening bars of God Save the King.
Since they were close to the Burmese front, which was swarming with soldiers, Magener and von Have now pretended to be Swiss businessmen and travelled on by train and river steamer to Chittagong, from where they took a sampan to Cox's Bazaar. They then began to walk through the jungle, blundering through an Allied airfield and an army camp in the dark.
Hunger now became a very real problem, as did the approaching monsoon, but after more than a month on the run they crossed the Naaf River into Burma. Guided by the sound of of heavy artillery fire, soaking wet and utterly exhausted, they stumbled on towards the front line near Maungdaw.
Suddenly, fleeing from an army of leeches along a narrow gorge, they found three rifles levelled at their chests. Uncertain as to the identity of their captors, Magener tried the only Japanese he knew: "Watakuschi tatschi wa doitsu jin desu (We are German)." "Doitsu?" replied an incredulous Japanese corporal.
But having escaped from the frying pan, Magener and von Have now found themselves in the fire. The Japanese were convinced that they were spies and, as they knew no one at the German Embassy in Tokyo, they were imprisoned once more and interrogated by Japanese Intelligence.
Von Have was afflicted by malaria and dysentery, and after two months on starvation rations they were sent on to another jail at Rangoon, where they were appalled by the conditions inflicted on Allied prisoners.
Then, four months after they had escaped, the news of their presence was given to the Press and they were put on a flight to Japan. There they saw out the war, working as honorary consuls at the German Embassy in Tokyo.
Rolf Magener was born in Odessa on August 3 1910 to a German father and Russian mother. He grew up in Germany and went on to study industrial management, spending part of his course in England, at Exeter, where he learned to speak fluent English. He then travelled widely around south-east Asia, and on the outbreak of war was working in Bombay for the German multi-national I G Farben Industrie.
After the end of the war, Magener was not finally able to return to Germany until 1947; when he arrived, he was then again imprisoned by the Americans at the reception camp at Ludwigsburg. He was eventually released and later worked in Asia again before taking a senior post with Mercedes in Germany.
He remained a great friend and admirer of Britain all his life, and regularly spent the winter in London. He published an account of his escape, Prisoners' Bluff, in 1953. Heins von Have died in 1995. Heinrich Harrer now lives in Liechtenstein.
Rolf Magener is survived by his wife Doris (née von Behling), whom he married in 1947 while she was working at the German Trade Mission in Japan.
