Kenneth Lockwood, who died Monday at 95, was one of the first six British army officers to arrive at Colditz Castle in 1940, and he remained there to play a key role in many of the escape attempts made during the next four years. Later, as secretary of the Colditz Association for 50 years, he represented the prisoners’ views as the legend mushroomed and became distorted by modern publicity.

Known as “The Ear,” Lockwood was the right-hand man to the chairman of the escape committee, Pat Reid. As accountant of the prisoners’ shop, he sold 80,000 German cigarettes to a guard for 700 Reichsmarks.

Whenever escapers needed help, Lockwood was on hand, slipping one a 50 Reichsmark note, finding a pair of rubber-soled shoes for another to climb down a wall, or hiding incriminating evidence from snooping guards.

When a manhole that led down to the drains was discovered in the shop floor, he arranged for a German guard to be distracted while he made an imprint of the shop’s key in soap. A replica was fashioned that enabled prisoners to enter the shop at night to work on a tunnel.

When 12 prisoners made their break through it, their leader Reid arrived at one end, followed immediately by Lockwood, to find that guards had been posted at both ends. “So we came out and just roared with laughter, and that defeated the Germans completely,” Lockwood recalled. “They couldn’t understand it at all.”

He also pretended to be ill in the sick bay so that those working on another tunnel could hide under his bed before continuing with their digging, and acted as a stagehand for the prisoners’ show “Ballet Nonsense” while helping a future Tory member of Parliament, Airey Neave, to make his “home run” back to Britain.

As news of Lockwood’s role in the camp reached London, a stream of parcels from supposedly innocent friends were sent to him by the escape organization MI9. One consisted of handkerchiefs containing sugared almonds, which disclosed instructions for a detailed code when dropped in water; others included money and maps.

As these were often discovered by the authorities, Lockwood used a skill he had learned at school to make maps from jelly. “The system was good for about 30 copies, working rather like a printing press,” Lockwood remembered. “And the jelly was never wasted at the end of it. We ate it.”

The son of a London stockbroker, Lockwood was born on December 17, 1911, and learned French and German at school. After mobilization in 1939, he was sent abroad to Le Mans, where he took the chance to drive a truck around the famous racing circuit. Two weeks after the Germans attacked France in May 1940, he was captured during the retreat to Dunkirk.

Lockwood was first sent to Laufen Castle, near the Austrian border. He was one of six men who, with the aid of two nails and a stone, spent three weeks digging a tunnel. Lockwood, disguised as a woman, and the others escaped. But the biscuits with which he had filled his bra crumbled as he scrambled through.

As neophyte escapers, they wore only the crudest civilian clothes and carried no papers. Lockwood took a train, which turned out to be going in the wrong direction, so he had to double back and was arrested on the road to Switzerland, mistaken for a burglar.

All six men were threatened with execution but after a week in solitary confinement were dispatched to Colditz, the sinister medieval fortress on the Mulde River in eastern Germany that was home to prisoners who had tried to escape.

By April 1945 Reid had made a successful break, but Lockwood was still at Colditz when an American relief force finally arrived — and was deterred from shelling the castle only by signs hung out by the prisoners. Although his incarceration was hardly comfortable, Lockwood realized how much harder the war had been for some others when he was with an American patrol that entered a nearby concentration camp.

With such memories, Lockwood settled back into his father’s firm on the stock exchange.

The former prisoners decided to form an association for regular meetings. Lockwood, who had no wife, agreed to be the secretary responsible for organizing reunions.

By the 1980s, what had been only one of a large number of wartime servicemen’s organizations had turned — thanks to an aura of schoolboy bravado nurtured by the flood of books, films, television dramas, and documentaries — into an unrivaled symbol of the wartime generation’s dashing, frustrated, yet upright youth.

While uneasily accepting his steady evolution into “Mr. Colditz” in the British public mind, Lockwood retained his dogged common sense. At first he denied that his members would ever agree to revisit the castle, but eventually he said he would like to go back to see what escaping opportunities they had missed when it became clear that others were similarly tempted.

He was on hand in 2000 for the launch of a full-size model of the glider that the prisoners were building in the eaves of the castle when the Americans arrived.