He was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army at the beginning of 1915 and fought in World War I. Shmidt became a Full Cavalier of the Cross of St. George and an officer.

Shmidt joined the Red Army and fought in the Russian Civil War, initially as a partisan.

In 1936, Shmidt was one of the first Red Army officers to be arrested in the Great Purge, and was executed a year later.

During heavy fighting near Shepetivka with Symon Petliura's army, Shmidt, according to the citation, had been seriously wounded but remained in the battle, personally operating guns against an armored train.

In November, he led the brigade in fighting at Tsaritsyn during the Armed Forces of South Russia's retreat.

In May, he became chief of staff of the 17th Cavalry Division, fighting against units of the remnants of the Ukrainian People's Army and capturing Ilintsy.

Shmidt was relieved of command of the division after shooting an officer who insulted his wife in the stomach, and in May 1927 became head of the North Caucasian Mountain Nationalities Cavalry School.

As he finished, he made a gesture as though to draw his sabre and told the Secretary General that one day he'd lop his ears off.

Stalin listened without saying a word, but his face was dead white and his lips were drawn in a tight line.

[3]In 1928 Shmidt graduated from the Higher Officers' Improvement Courses (KUVNAS) at the Frunze Military Academy.

Between 1931 and 1933 Shmidt was as a student in the Special Group of the Frunze Military Academy, after which he became commander and commissar of the 2nd Mechanized Brigade.

In May 1936 he was recommended for an award of the Order of Lenin and for appointment as commander of the Automobile and Tank Directorate of the Leningrad Military District.

He was accused of conspiring to assassinate Kliment Voroshilov and preparing to use the 8th Mechanized Brigade to overthrow Soviet power in Kiev.

On 1 June 1937, after months of interrogation, he confessed to being part of a "Military-Trotsykite Center" conspiring to assassinate Voroshilov and "wrecking" his brigade.

Shmidt named B. Kuzmichev, Mikhail Zyuk, Vitaly Primakov, and Semyon Turovsky as members of the conspiracy.

He identified Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Ieronim Uborevich, Innokenty Khalepsky, and Iona Yakir as leaders of the conspiracy.

[2] Alexander Barmine, his fellow pupil at military college, remembered Shmidt as "absolutely brave, very simple and very determined, given to mockery and to spells of almost childish sentimentality.

Shmidt's demise is one of several deaths by purge that influenced Whittaker Chambers to defect from the Soviet underground during 1937–1938: In 1935 or 1936, I chanced to read in the press a little item of some nine or ten lines, perhaps less.

I felt this so strongly that I mentioned the item to J. Peters, the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party.

The little item about Dmitri Schmidt meant, of course, that the Great Purge had reached the Red Army.