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All Nazi document collectors are familiar with Permanent Employment Record booklets (Arbeitsbuch) used during the Third Reich. This is an unusual one, instead of a Nazi eagle on the front cover, this 4-1/8 x 5-7/8 inch, 38 page Arbeitsbuch has the coat of arms of Danzig on its cover. Each of the interior pages of this rare Arbeitsbuch also has the Danzig coat of arms or Wappen with the words Freie Stadt Danzig above and Arbeitsbuch below.

Albert Laskowski was the original owner of this Arbeitsbuch number 443Pe/00291. He was born on 16 July 1909 at Libau. He was a married man with four children when his German Arbeitsbuch was issued on 22 November 1940 in Dirschau, a German town on the Vistula River in Eastern Pomerania (now Tczew in Poland).

According to the information in this Arbeitsbuch, Laskowski started work in a sugar factory on 1 October 1938 and remained at Zuckerfabrik Pelplin AG until 30 January 1943. The next day he started a construction job in the city of Bromberg, south of Danzig.

After the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and the concurrent liberation of Free City Danzig, the words Freie Stadt Danzig on the last page of this rare Arbeitsbuch were over-stamped with Deutsches Reich. The words Freie Stadt Danzig on the front cover were blocked out and the words Deutsches Reich were stamped at the top of the front cover as well.

At the end of World War II, the German name Danzig was changed to the Polish name Gdansk.

From times long before Napoleon, the south side of the Baltic was a part of the possessions of Teutonic Knights and subsequently became a part of Prussia, and Germany after confederation of the German states. In the wake of his victories, Napoleon declared the city and port of Danzig a Free State (it had been a famous Hanseatic port) and although not contiguous with Poland, Polish goods came and went via the Vistula River and the port of the German Free City of Danzig.

At the end of World War I, the country of Poland demanded, and got from Germany through the Treaty of Versailles, a "Corridor" from northern Poland across western Prussia to the Free City of Danzig on the eastern edge of the Corridor on the Baltic Sea