Anton Schmid

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Anton Schmid (January 9, 1900 – April 13, 1942) was a German soldier 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.^[1] He did this by hiding them, supplying them with false ID papers and helping them escape.

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." Germany renamed a military base Feldwebel Anton Schmid Kaserne in his honor for his courage.