Schmid Anton

Schmid, Anton Anton Schmid was born in 1900 in Vienna, where he owned a business in Klosterneuburger Street in Wien-Brigittenau that sold technical, electronic and radio equipment. He was married and the father of a daughter. In 1938, after the German annexation of Austria, Schmid helped Jewish acquaintances to get to the Czech border in order to escape. In 1941, as part of his service in the German military, Schmid was stationed in Vilna in occupied Lithuania. Holding the rank of sergeant (Feldwebel), he was responsible for a unit that collected German soldiers that had lost track of their original units and assigned them to new ones (Versprengtenssammelstelle). Schmid’s unit had three buildings at its disposal, containing various workshops where Jews and non-Jews worked as slave laborers. Schmid began to help Jews from the Vilna ghetto. He employed Jews who had forged documents in his military office, procuring army uniforms and false papers for some of them personally. He allowed his Jewish workers to smuggle food into the ghetto, and occasionally accompanied them into the ghetto himself in order to keep the guards from confiscating the food. He also helped Jews to escape from Vilna to other cities in Poland. During the second half of 1941, Schmid stepped up his efforts to save the Jews. During this period, he met the ex-wife of one of his friends from Austria, an opera singer named Anita Adler, who was currently married to the Jewish poet and journalist Hermann Adler. Anita Adler told Schmid that her husband was being detained in Vilna’s Łukiszki prison, where inmates were being held before being murdered. Schmid used his influence to get Adler released from prison, then let the couple stay in a hideout in his offices. Hermann Adler was acquainted with members of the pioneering Zionist organizations in Vilna that had organized for resistance against the Nazi regime. In November 1941 Adler introduced Schmid to Mordecai Tenenbaum (Tamaroff), the head of the Hehalutz- Hatza’ir - Dror group. Schmid and Tenenbaum became friends, and Schmid was of great help to the underground work of the Pioneering Zionist groups, hiding activists in his home during particularly dangerous periods. During this period, many Jews wanted to escape Lithuania, and Vilna in particular, and to go to places that were considered safer, such as Bialystok, or Woronowo and Lida (near Vilna). Schmid used military trucks belonging to his army unit to send Jews to these places, hanging signs on the trucks saying that they carried explosive materials in order to discourage searches by the border guards and soldiers at the roadblocks. At the beginning, five or six Jews were sent in each truck. Later, the number rose to 20-30 Jews per “delivery.” In December 1941 the Jews of Vilna were divided into two groups. Non-workers, designated for deportation, were issued white papers. Workers and their families received yellow papers. Schmid drafted as many Jews as possible, including some who were unable to work, for work in his unit, so that they would be classified as workers. He used his truck to smuggle some Jews holding white papers to Belorussia. Schmid managed to secure the release of Jews incarcerated in the Łukiszki prison, saying that they were vital workers needed by his unit. He also transferred food and supplies to the Jews of the ghetto, and hid them in the basements of the buildings for which he was responsible. When he knew in advance about Aktionen he warned the Jews. At the end of 1941, the pioneering Zionist groups of Vilna began to dispatch organized groups of its members to Warsaw and Bialystok, among other places, in order to tell people about the massacre at Ponary, and to help build cells of armed resistance. These plans could not have come to fruition without Schmid’s help. In December 1941 he sent a truck to Warsaw containing a delegation of four Pioneering group members, and in early January 1942, he transferred 14 of the Hehalutz Hatza’ir-Dror Zionist group to Bialystok, who founded the core of a Pioneering group under Tenenbaum’s leadership, who had also moved to the city. During the second half of January 1942, Schmid was captured by the authorities, put on military trial in Vilna and sentenced to death. On April 13, 1942 he was executed by a firing squad. After the war, Hermann Adler moved with his wife to Switzerland, where he became a well-known poet. In his book "The Murderers Among Us" Simon Wisenthal described how he was asked by Vilna survivors with whom he had been in contact for documenting the crimes of the perpetrators to visit Schmid's widow. Mrs. Schmid and her daughter told him that when it became known that he had been executed for his helping Jews, life became very difficult for them. They were accused of being the wife and daughter of a traitor, and some neighbors threatened her and told her to go elsewhere. A few people broke the windows of her home. She also told Wiesenthal that her deepest wish was to visit her husband's grave, and consequently he arranged her visit to the cemetery in Vilna. On December 22, 1966, Yad Vashem recognized Anton Schmid as Righteous Among the Nations. In 2016 a camp of the Bundeswehr, the German army, in Blankenberg in the Federal State of Sachsen-Anhalt, was named after Schmid - "Feldwebel Anton Schmid Kaserne"