My Military Adventures

This book tells the story of a young Latvian man's war and captivity. Reinholds Mārtinš Švāgers, who was conscripted into the Latvian Legion at the age of nineteen, was one of the small cogs in Germany's multi-million-strong army that reached the brink of abyss in Europe, but was desperately trying to fight the Soviet Union on two fronts. Since the summer of 1944 Germany's defeat in the war was only a matter of time. However, Nazi Germany involved the people of occupied countries in continuing the war and trying every way of persuading the soldiers and the civilian population that the fate of the resulting victims was not in vain. Latvian soldiers who had served in the German armed forces ended up in the prisoner-of-war camps of all four occupation forces. Švāgers was one of the few Latvian soldiers who kept a diary of his adventures. Somehow he survived the war and captivity. Thanks to his British captors he and his comrades were not forcibly sent back to Soviet occupied Latvia as the USSR had demanded, and he eventually was able to settle in the west of England. This is a unique, remarkable account of one soldier’s experiences in an almost unknown aspect of the Second World War.