From life at Courland Pocket, Latvia, to the smoking stub of a cigarette. This shoe sole has seen many things in its lifetime. At Courland Pocket a large group of Nazi German forces were surrounded by the Red Army for just under a year, from 1944-1945. Roughly 180,000 German soldiers were captured and taken into Baltic prisoner of war camps. Of all these German soldiers, this ashtray tin cast of a Jäger Boot shoe sole serves as a battlefield relic, and was supposedly recovered during the excavation of a German bunker.