The execution of Anton Schmid

On 13 April 1942, in the military prison on Stefańska Street in Wilno (Vilnius), a Wehrmacht firing squad shot the 42-year-old Feldwebel (sergeant) Anton Schmid, a Viennese electrician and radio dealer. The court of Feldkommandantur 814, the German field headquarters in Wilno, had sentenced him to death on 25 February. The trial records have not survived, so it is not known exactly how the charge was worded or who brought it, but the reason for the verdict is beyond doubt: for several months Schmid had hidden Jews, issued them with papers, driven them in army lorries out of the Wilno Ghetto to places that were thought to be safer, and worked with the emerging Jewish underground. In his last letter to his wife he wrote that he had acted “only as a human being” and had not wanted to harm anyone.

Popular biographical sketches state that Schmid died “having witnessed the crimes at Ponary and rescuing Jews”. This needs qualifying. Schmid arrived in Wilno at the end of August or in September 1941, when the executions at Ponary (Paneriai) had already been going on for two months. Nothing suggests that he was ever in the forest at Ponary himself. He did, however, see the round-ups in the city’s streets and people being herded together and then taken away to their deaths, and he knew of the shootings from what he was told. What moved him to rescue people was not a single sight but the pleas of particular people who turned to him for help.

A Viennese in uniform

Anton Schmid was born on 9 January 1900 in Vienna, into a Catholic baker’s family; his parents came from Nikolsburg in Moravia (now Mikulov). As a boy he worked for the post office as a telegraph messenger. In July 1918 he was called up into the Austro-Hungarian army and in the last months of the war fought on the Piave front. Afterwards he trained as an electrician and fitter, married Stefanie, with whom he had a daughter, Gertrude, and opened an electrical shop selling radios on Klosterneuburger Straße in the working-class district of Brigittenau. He was a devout man and belonged to no party. The German historian Wolfram Wette, his biographer, calls him a “civilian in uniform” to whom military culture remained alien. Hermann Adler, one of the Jews he saved, recalled that he was a simple man who did not read the newspapers and rejected Nazism not for political reasons but because he could not accept people being harmed.

Soon after the Anschluss in March 1938 Schmid stood up for a Jewish neighbour when a boy was smashing the windows of his shop, and helped several Jewish acquaintances escape abroad. After the outbreak of war he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht; sources give 1939 or 1940. Because of his age he was not sent to the front. He served with Landesschützen guard units in occupied Poland and rose to the rank of Feldwebel, equivalent to a sergeant.

The collection point in Wilno

After the attack on the Soviet Union his unit – according to some studies the 898th Landesschützen Battalion – was moved in the summer of 1941 to Wilno, now in German hands. There Schmid was put in charge of the Versprengtensammelstelle, a collection point for soldiers who had lost touch with their units in the fighting. Attached to it were workshops, among them a carpentry and an upholstery shop, in which Jewish forced labourers worked.

At the turn of August and September 1941, after a staged “provocation” against German soldiers, Germans and Lithuanian policemen took thousands of Jews to Ponary, and on 6 September they shut the rest into two ghettos. In a letter to his wife in April 1942 Schmid described what he had seen and heard at the time: the Jews were rounded up by Lithuanian soldiers and shot in a meadow outside the city, “always 2,000–3,000 people at a time”, and on the way children were killed by being dashed against trees.

The first people he saved were those who asked him for help themselves. Max Salinger, a Jew from Bielsko who knew Polish and German, received from Schmid the paybook of a fallen Wehrmacht soldier and a job as a typist in the collection point’s office. Luisa Emaitisaite, a young Lithuanian Jewish woman caught outside the ghetto after curfew, Schmid first hid in his own quarters and then took on in the office as a shorthand typist. Both survived the war.

In the autumn of 1941, when the Germans introduced the yellow work permits (Gelbe Scheine) that decided who would stay in the ghetto and who would go to Ponary, Schmid’s workshops employed about 150 Jews. He was allotted only 15 permits, which together with their families protected some 60 people. According to witnesses, he drove the others, who begged him to save them, by lorry to Lida, where Jews then felt safer. Later he obtained more permits, and several times he managed to get his workers out of Łukiszki prison, from which the road led to Ponary.

Ally of the underground

In the autumn of 1941 Schmid was approached by members of the Zionist youth movements Dror and Hashomer Hatzair, to whom he had been recommended as a man willing to help. From November he hid the writer Hermann Adler and his wife Anita, who had false papers, in his official quarters. Through Adler he met the leaders of the underground, above all Mordechai Tenenbaum of Dror and Chaika Grossman of Hashomer Hatzair. His flat became a meeting place; on New Year’s Eve 1941, the same night on which Abba Kovner’s manifesto calling for resistance was read out in the ghetto, underground activists gathered at Schmid’s. According to accounts, Tenenbaum then made him an honorary member of the movement.

Schmid, Adler and Tenenbaum worked out a way of getting people out of Wilno. Schmid made out travel orders as if he were transporting workers needed by the Wehrmacht, and took Jews in army lorries to Lida, Grodno and Białystok, whose ghettos had not at that time been subjected to operations on the scale of those in Wilno. According to accounts, couriers of the underground also left by this route, carrying news of Ponary to other ghettos. The number of people Schmid saved is an estimate: the figure most often given is about 250–300, Austrian and German studies speak of more than 300, and the historian Dieter Pohl, in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, of at least 300–400. For many of them the reprieve proved temporary, since the Germans liquidated the ghettos in Lida, Grodno and Białystok in 1942–1943. Schmid did not supply the underground with weapons, since it then had almost none; he helped it to survive and to communicate. Kovner testified after the war that it was from Schmid that he first heard the name of Adolf Eichmann: the Feldwebel passed on a rumour he had heard that everything was being run by “some dog named Eichmann”.

Arrest and sentence

At the end of January 1942 Schmid was arrested – according to some accounts during one of the transports – and held in the military prison on Stefańska Street. Who informed on him is not known; Austrian studies suggest that he was denounced by two fellow soldiers. On 25 February 1942 the court of Feldkommandantur 814 sentenced him to death. The literature describes the charge in various ways, from aiding the enemy to war treason, but the judgement has not survived, and all that is certain is that he was punished for helping Jews.

He waited seven weeks for the sentence to be carried out. Only two of his letters have survived. In the last, to his wife and daughter, he described how Jews were being shot outside the city and asked forgiveness for having put his family at risk: “I only acted as a human being and did not want to hurt anyone.” Austrian and German publications also quote from this letter a sentence to the effect that if every decent Christian tried to save even one Jew, the party functionaries would have serious trouble with the “solution of the Jewish question”.

On 13 April 1942 Schmid was shot. He was buried at the edge of the military cemetery at Antokol (Antakalnis). He was one of very few Wehrmacht soldiers executed for rescuing Jews. His wife learned of the sentence from an official notification; neighbours in Vienna called him a traitor, and someone smashed her windows. At that time the Wilno Ghetto, after the autumn and December operations, was going through a period of relative calm; fewer than 20,000 people lived in it, and Karl Jäger had already reported in his report of 1 December 1941 that the only Jews left in Lithuania were those needed for work and their families. By the summer of 1942 not a single Jew was still working in the workshops at the collection point.

Place in the war

Schmid’s story shows that even an NCO of the Wehrmacht in the occupied East had room to choose. The army was no neutral observer of the destruction of the Jews in Lithuania: its field headquarters cooperated with the SS and the police, and its units made use of Jewish slave labour. Rescuers in uniform were exceptions. In Wilno itself Major Karl Plagge took a similar path, though within the limits of the system, protecting hundreds of Jews in a vehicle repair works until the summer of 1944. What set Schmid apart was that he did not merely save individuals but knowingly helped the Jewish resistance movement, which in January 1942 founded the United Partisan Organisation (FPO) in the ghetto. According to researchers, an account of the New Year’s Eve meeting at his flat was carried to Warsaw by the courier Lonka Kozibrodzka; it found its way into the Ringelblum Archive (PL), assembled by Emanuel Ringelblum.

His memory long divided opinion. The first to describe his deeds, in 1945, was Hermann Adler, in a prose poem published in Switzerland, Gesänge aus der Stadt des Todes (Songs from the City of Death). In 1961, at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Kovner spoke about him; Hannah Arendt described in Eichmann in Jerusalem the silence that fell over the courtroom, and added that everything would have looked different if more such stories could have been told. On 22 December 1966 Yad Vashem recognised Schmid as one of the Righteous Among the Nations; this is the date Pohl gives, while other sources give 1964, or 1967, the year in which the medal was presented to his widow. In 1965 Simon Wiesenthal helped her travel to Wilno, where a new headstone was placed on the grave, with an inscription saying that here lay a man who believed it was more important to help his fellow men than to live.

In Austria and Germany many still regarded him as a traitor. For a long time Austria did not recognise him as a victim of Nazism, which deprived his family of the benefits due to them. Vienna commemorated him with a plaque only in 1990. On 8 May 2000 the Bundeswehr named its barracks in Rendsburg after him. It was the first official honour paid by the German armed forces to a soldier who had rescued Jews, and at the same time a sign of a changing view of the Wehrmacht’s role in the war; the barracks’ previous namesake, a general who had served in both world wars, had to make way, and the unit’s commander protested. After the Rendsburg garrison closed, Schmid’s name was given in 2016 to the barracks in Blankenburg, and in 2020 to the headquarters of the Austrian Ministry of Defence in Vienna. The Feldwebel who had been shot in 1942 for “treason” became for both armies a model of a soldier’s moral courage.