Anton Schmid

Anton Schmid (9 January 1900 – 13 April 1942) was an Austrian Wehrmacht recruit who saved Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania.

A devout but apolitical Roman Catholic and an electrician by profession, Schmid was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and later into the Wehrmacht during World War II.

Anton Schmid was born in Vienna, then Austria-Hungary, on 9 January 1900.

His father was a baker, and both of his parents were devout Roman Catholics from Nikolsburg, Moravia (now Mikulov, Czech Republic).

They had Schmid baptized and educated him in a Catholic elementary school.

After graduation, he apprenticed as an electrician.

Schmid was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1918 and survived intense battles during the retreat from Italy in the final months of World War I.

He became an electrician and opened a small radio shop on, Brigittenau, Vienna where he employed two Jews.

Allegedly, as a young man he was in love with a Jewish girl.

Schmid, who was married and had one daughter, did not belong to any organizations besides the Catholic Church.

Little else is known about Schmid's life before World War II.

After the German annexation of Austria in 1938, Schmid made a citizen's arrest of a man who broke the window of a Jewish neighbor and helped some Jewish friends escape into nearby Czechoslovakia.

After the outbreak of war upon the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he was drafted into the German army, but was not expected to serve on the front lines due to his age.

According to German historian Wolfram Wette, he was a "civilian in uniform" who did not conform to military culture.

Wette describes him as a non-ideological humanitarian whose opposition to Nazism stemmed purely from his respect for human life.

According to, one of the Jews whom Schmid rescued, he was a "simple sergeant" and "a socially awkward man in thought and speech" who did not read newspapers or books.

At first he was stationed in Poland and Belarus.

Put in charge of an office to return stranded German soldiers to their units in late August 1941, he began to help Jews after being approached by two pleading for his intercession.

Schmid hid Jews in his apartment, obtained work permits to save Jews from the Ponary massacre, transferred Jews in Wehrmacht trucks to safer locations, and aided the Vilna Ghetto underground.

In late August 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was transferred to the Landeswehr Battalion 898 in Vilnius, then part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland German occupation zone.

Schmid was reassigned to an office called Feldkommandantur 814, whose personnel were charged with collecting German soldiers who had been separated from their units and reassigning them.

Although Sgt. Schmid interrogated the soldiers strictly, he sympathized with them—many were in fact suffering from combat fatigue—and avoided charging them with offenses under German military law such as desertion or cowardice in the face of the enemy, which would have resulted in court martial and the death penalty.

During the first week of September 1941 alone, 3,700 Jews of Vilnius were rounded up and murdered, most at the Ponary killing pits outside of town.

Schmid could see the collection point outside the window and witnessed scenes of great brutality.

The first Jew whom he helped was Max Salinger, a Polish Jew from Bielsko Biala fluent in Polish and German; most likely Salinger approached Schmid.

Schmid gave Salinger the paybook of Private Max Huppert, a Wehrmacht soldier who had been killed, and employed him as a typist in the office.

Salinger survived the war.

The second Jew whom Schmid rescued was a 23-year-old Lithuanian Jewish woman named Luisa Emaitisaite.

Emaitisaite had managed to dodge the roundups one day but was caught outside the ghetto after curfew, which was punishable by death.

Hiding in a doorway, she saw Schmid walking past and begged for his help.

Schmid hid her in his apartment temporarily and later hired her for the office, where her knowledge of several languages and stenography was helpful.

Her work permit protected her and she also survived the war.

These examples show that Schmid did not set out to help Jews, but instead that his rescue actions were driven by their appeals for help.

As part of the Wehrmacht policy of economic exploitation of conquered territories, a section was added for carpentry and upholstery, which Schmid directed.

Due to the lack of willing, skilled Lithuanian workers, many Jews were employed.

It is estimated that he saved as many as 300 Jews before his arrest in January 1942.

Schmid was court-martialed for actively protecting Jews, sentenced to death, and shot on 13 April 1942.

After the war, Schmid was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for his efforts to help Jews and was seen as a symbol of the few Germans who defied their government's extermination program.

His reception was more conflicted in Germany and Austria, where he was still viewed as a traitor for decades.

The first official commemoration of him in Germany did not occur until 2000, but he is now hailed as an example of civil courage for Bundeswehr soldiers to follow.