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Anton Schmid (born january 9, 1900) was a German sergeant (feldwebel) who, during World War II 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.-
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. In a letter to his wife, Stefi, Schmid described his horror at the sight of mass murder and of "children being beaten on the way". He went on: "You know how it is with my soft heart. I could not think and had to help them."
Vilnius and Warsaw were Europe's two preeminent centers of Jewish cultural, intellectual, religious and political life. In the summer of 1941, the Nazis launched a genocidal campaign of mass murder and deportations to death camps that, in three years, systematically killed about 180,000 Jews, i.e. about 94% of the Jews living in Lithuania before World War II, the largest percentage of any country.-
Anton Schmid was moved by the suffering of the Jews in the Vilnius ghetto and decided to help. He managed to release Jews from jail and risked his own life by smuggling food into the ghetto. His courageous assistance involved the saving of more than 250 Jews whom he managed to hide and the supplying of materiel and forged papers to the Jewish underground.
Discovered and arrested in January 1942, and summarily tried before a Nazi military court on February 25, Anton Schmid was executed on April 13 by the Nazis for his acts.-
"I merely behaved as a human being," he said in his last letter to his wife.-
The post-war Federal Republic of Germany renamed a military base in Rendsburg "Feldwebel-Schmid-Kaserne" in honor for his courage. In Haifa, Israel, the entry to town from the southern freeway is named "Anton Schmid Circus" in his honour.
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. In a letter to his wife, Stefi, Schmid described his horror at the sight of mass murder and of "children being beaten on the way". He went on: "You know how it is with my soft heart. I could not think and had to help them."
Vilnius and Warsaw were Europe's two preeminent centers of Jewish cultural, intellectual, religious and political life. In the summer of 1941, the Nazis launched a genocidal campaign of mass murder and deportations to death camps that, in three years, systematically killed about 180,000 Jews, i.e. about 94% of the Jews living in Lithuania before World War II, the largest percentage of any country.-
Anton Schmid was moved by the suffering of the Jews in the Vilnius ghetto and decided to help. He managed to release Jews from jail and risked his own life by smuggling food into the ghetto. His courageous assistance involved the saving of more than 250 Jews whom he managed to hide and the supplying of materiel and forged papers to the Jewish underground.
Discovered and arrested in January 1942, and summarily tried before a Nazi military court on February 25, Anton Schmid was executed on April 13 by the Nazis for his acts.-
"I merely behaved as a human being," he said in his last letter to his wife.-
The post-war Federal Republic of Germany renamed a military base in Rendsburg "Feldwebel-Schmid-Kaserne" in honor for his courage. In Haifa, Israel, the entry to town from the southern freeway is named "Anton Schmid Circus" in his honour.
