Anton Schmid (9 January 1900 - 13 April 1942) was an Austrian sergeant in the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War who was executed in 1942 for protecting Lithuanian Jews from the Holocaust.
Biography[]
Schmid was born in Vienna in 1900. Not much is known about his life before the Second World War other than that he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1918 and briefly fought in the First World War before the Austrian surrender at the end of the year. He apparently employed two Jews at his radio shop in Vienna and may have been in love with a Jewish girl.
When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, leading to a rise in anti-Jewish violence encouraged by the new regime, Schmid helped several Jewish friends flee to Czechoslovakia and made a citizen's arrest of a man who broke a Jewish neighbour's window. He was drafted into the German Army in 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War and was ultimately assigned to Battalion 898 in Vilnius in August 1941. Schmid was the head of the office in charge of returning separated German soldiers to their units. Schmid also had responsibility for prosecuting cases of desertion and cowardice, but he sympathized with the soldiers, many of whom were suffering from combat fatigue or PTSD, and avoided charging them with such offences that could result in the death penalty.
During the first week of September 1941, 3, 700 Jews were rounded up in Vilnius and murdered at the Ponary killing pits outside of town as part of the German campaign of genocide known as the Holocaust. Schmid could see the killing pits from his window and witnessed scenes of great brutality which motivated him to try and protect as many Jews as possible from this fate. He was first approached by a Jew named Max Salinger who had managed to evade the round-up and gave him papers identifying him as a German solider named Max Huppert. He later encountered a Jewish woman named Luisa Emaitisaite hiding in a doorway who explained that she had managed to dodge the round-up and begged him to help her. Schmid hid her in his apartment and issued her a work permit employing her as a stenographer in his office, protecting her from deportation. Both Salinger and Emaitisaite survived the war as a result of Schmid's actions.
Schmid was able to set up an office for carpentry and upholstery staffed mainly by Jews who would be issued with work permits protecting them and their families from being killed. However, in October 1941 most of the work permits for Schmid's 150 workers were cancelled with a view to murdering as many Jews as possible. Only 15 of Schmid's work permits remained valid, which covered 60 Jews including holders and family. Schmid arranged for the Wehrmacht to drive the remaining 90 Jews up to Lida in Belarus, where they were able to avoid being killed for longer, and managed to obtain several more work permits for some of these Jews.
In November 1941, Schmid began hiding Hermann Adler, a member of the Lithuanian Jewish resistance, and his wife Anita in his apartment. Adler introduced Schmid to leading Jewish partisan Mordechai Tenenbaum, who made Schmid an honorary member of the Vilna Zionist Organization and began using his apartment as a meeting place for Jewish partisans. Together, Schmid, Tenenbaum and Adler began planning to rescue a large number of Jews from the ghetto by having them transferred to locations in Belarus and Poland where it was believed they would be safer than in Vilnius. Under the pretext of moving the workforce to where it was most needed, Schmid arranged for around 300 Jews, including Adler, to be transported to Belarus or Poland in the hope of protecting them from death. It has been estimated that around 250 Jews ultimately survived the Holocaust due to Schmid's protection.
In January 1942 Schmid was arrested on suspicion of collaborating with the Jewish resistance. It is unclear how he was found out as the trial record does not survive, but he was sentenced to death on 25 February 1942 and shot on 13 April.