ARBEITSKOMMADO 20132: The Memoirs of Private James Peters 1939 - 1945

These are the personal memoirs of a British soldier during the Second World War. The account commences with his units deployment to France in September 1939, then engaging in combat with the enemy, to his capture and the journey into incarceration. It describes the forced labour and routine inhumanity, to the death marches of 1945, and through to liberation. The story is told in a diarist style with the addition of broader historical details. It could be the story of many thousands of service personnel that during their ignominious captivity became classified as Arbeitskommandos, and who were used as forced labourers within Hitlers Third Reich, and emerged as emaciated shadows of their former selves. Their individual stories have now mostly faded into obscurity, and the conditions that they endured under the Nazi regime has generally remained unacknowledged and is rarely included in the historical narrative of the Second World War.