We show that the proper homotopy type of any properly c-connected locally finite n-dimensional CW-complex is represented by a closed polyhedron in $ℝ^{2n-c}$ (Theorem I). The case n - c ≥ 3 is a special case of a general proper homotopy embedding theorem (Theorem II). For n - c ≤ 2 we need some basic properties of "proper" algebraic topology which are summarized in Appendices A and B. The results of this paper are the proper analogues of classical results by Stallings [17] and Wall [20] for finite CW-complexes; see also Dranišnikov and Repovš [7].