Escape to Athena

Escape to Athena is a British adventure war film with several elements of comedy released in 1979, directed and coauthored by George Pan Cosmatos and produced by Lew Grades ITC Entertainment. The international cast included many wellknown actors of the 1970s, including Roger Moore, Telly Savalas and Elliott Gould.

In 1944 allied POWs, at a remote POW camp on an unnamed island, are forced to excavate ancient Greek artifacts. The camp Commandant, Major Otto Hecht Roger Moore, who was an Austrian antiques dealer before the war, is sending some of the valuable pieces to his sister living in Switzerland. However the prisoners have discovered they will be sent to other POW camps once the artifacts run out, so they operate a ruse in which they repeatedly discover the same pieces.While Hecht is just content to sit out the war, the SS Commandant of the nearby town, Major Volkmann Anthony Valentine, is his complete opposite. He and his Lieutenants Siegfried Rauch and Richard Wren rule with a sadistic grip, executing the innocent residents just as easily as enemy soldiers. ........

Source: Wikipedia