Anton Schmid (9 January 1900 – 13 April 1942) was an Austrian Wehrmacht recruit who saved Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania.

Put in charge of an office to return stranded German soldiers to their units in late August 1941, he began to help Jews after being approached by two pleading for his intercession.

After the war, Schmid was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for his efforts to help Jews and was seen as a symbol of the few Germans who defied their government's extermination program.

[1] Schmid was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1918[1] and survived intense battles during the retreat from Italy in the final months of World War I.

According to Hermann Adler [de; fr], one of the Jews whom Schmid rescued, he was a "simple sergeant" and "a socially awkward man in thought and speech" who did not read newspapers or books.

[7] In late August 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was transferred to the Landeswehr Battalion 898 in Vilnius, then part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland German occupation zone.

Schmid interrogated the soldiers strictly, he sympathized with them—many were in fact suffering from combat fatigue—and avoided charging them with offenses under German military law such as desertion or cowardice in the face of the enemy, which would have resulted in court martial and the death penalty.

Schmid gave Salinger the paybook of Private Max Huppert, a Wehrmacht soldier who had been killed, and employed him as a typist in the office.

As part of the Wehrmacht policy of economic exploitation of conquered territories, a section was added for carpentry and upholstery, which Schmid directed.

Schmid's office, with 150 Jewish workers at the time, was only allocated 15 permits, which covered 60 Jews including holders and family members.

[14] The Jews called these certificates "leave from death papers" because they usually prevented the police and SS from rounding up and murdering the holders.

[8] The other 90 Jews begged Schmid to drive them in Wehrmacht trucks to the nearby town of Lida, Belarus, where they believed that they would be safer.

Schmid, Adler, and Tenenbaum devised a plan to rescue Jews from the Vilna Ghetto by transporting them to Białystok, Lida, and Grodno, considered to be safer.

Because of his aid to the Jewish resistance movement, Schmid was arrested at the end of January 1942 and imprisoned at Stefanska Prison in Vilnius.

[27][28] Austria did not recognize Schmid as a victim of Nazism until the late 1950s, which denied his widow and daughter financial support to which they would otherwise have been entitled.

And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question – how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.

[33] Abba Kovner, a former member of the Vilna Ghetto resistance, testified about Schmid at the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

[36] The Bundeswehr's first official commemoration of a German soldier who had risked his life to save Jews during the Holocaust occurred on 8 May 2000, when it renamed a military base in Rendsburg "Feldwebel-Schmid-Kaserne [de]" in honor of his courage.

Schmid's name replaced that of General Günther Rüdel, a German officer who fought in both World Wars and sat as an honorary judge in Nazi People's Courts, which delivered summary verdicts ordering the execution of thousands of people following the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

[38][27] American historian Fritz Stern wrote that honoring Schmid "strengthens our democratic spirit" and is a repudiation of postwar attitudes in which German resistance was taboo.

[2] Wolfram Wette described Schmid as "one of the gold grains hidden under the heap of rubble"[b] in the history of Nazi Germany, as there were so few Germans willing to risk their lives to help Jews.