Anton Schmid



Anton Schmid (January 9, 1900, Vienna, Austria – April 13, 1942, Vilnius, Lithuania) was an Austrian conscript to the Wehrmacht in World War II who, as a sergeant (feldwebel) in Vilnius, Lithuania, was executed by his superiors for helping 250 Jewish men, women, and children escape from extermination by the Nazi SS during the European Jewish Holocaust. He did this by hiding them, supplying them with false ID papers and helping them escape.

Life
Anton Schmid was an electrician who owned a small radio shop in Vienna. Drafted into the German army after the Anschluss of 1938, Schmid found himself stationed near Vilnius in the autumn of 1941. The Germans had entered Lithuania shortly before. As a sergeant of the Wehrmacht, he witnessed the herding of Jews into two ghettos and the shooting of thousands of them in nearby Ponary.

Only two letters of him have been preserved as the only written testimonial of his motives. In one letter to his wife Stefi, Schmid described after his arrest his horror at the sight of mass murder and of children being beaten on the way:


 * „I will tell you how this came: there were many Jews here, who were rounded up by the Lithuanian militia and were shot on a lawn outside of the City, always around 2.000 to 3.000 people. The children were already killed on the way by hitting them to the trees. You can imagine.“ (″Will Dir noch mitteilen, wie das ganze kam: hier waren sehr viele Juden, die vom litauischen Militär zusammengetrieben und auf einer Wiese außerhalb der Stadt erschossen wurden, immer so 2000 – 3000 Menschen. Die Kinder haben sie auf dem Wege gleich an die Bäume angeschlagen. Kannst Dir ja denken.″)

His last words in a letter to his family:


 * „Ich habe nur als Mensch gehandelt und wollte ja niemandem weh tun.“
 * ''("I have only acted as a human and I did not want to hurt anyone.")

When his conviction became known in Vienna, several neighbours talked snidely to Mrs Schmid about the „Landesverräter“ (Traitor of his Country). Someone smashed one of her house's window panes.

Legacy
On 8 May 2000 he post-war Federal Republic of Germany renamed a military base in Rendsburg "Feldwebel-Schmid-Kaserne" in honor for his courage, but it was closed down in 2010. In Haifa, Israel, the entry to town from the southern freeway is named "Anton Schmid Circus" in his honour.

On 16 May 1967, the Israeli government paid tribute to Sergeant Anton Schmid. Yad Vashem awarded him recognition as a "Righteous Among the Nations" and presented his widow with the medal bearing the inscription: "Whoever saves one life - saves the world entire."

On May 8, 2000, by invitation of German Federal Minister of Defence Rudolf Scharping Heinz Fischer attended the barracks-appellation as President of the National Council of Austria in Rendsburg.

On July 10, 2013 President Heinz Fischer presented 50 books from Wolfram Wette, sponsored by the city of Vienna, to Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servants at the annual Holocaust Memorial Service reception with the purpose to pass those on to their locations of service abroad.