He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 - too old for the front lines. He was assigned to run an office near Vilna, Lithuania, that returned stranded German soldiers to their units — a logistical role, behind the lines, far from combat. In the autumn of 1941 he watched the Germans and Lithuanians begin herding Jews to a forest site called Ponary, nine kilometers outside the city. He wrote home to Stefanie: "The Lithuanian military herded many Jews to a meadow outside of town and shot them, each time around two thousand to three thousand people. On their way they killed the children by hurling them against the trees. You can imagine."

He could not walk past. Two Jews came to him first — strangers who had heard he might help - he helped them. Word spread quietly through the ghetto the way word of a safe person always spread — carefully, one person at a time, because the wrong person knowing could get everyone killed. He began issuing false work permits. The Jews in the ghetto called them "leave from death papers" because a permit fromSchmid's office usually kept the SS from taking the holder. He requisitioned Jews as workers for his office — more than he actually needed, to keep them off the deportation lists. He hid people in his apartment. He obtained forged identity documents and drove people out of Vilna in Wehrmacht military trucks, past German checkpoints, to safer locations in the countryside. He made contact with the underground resistance fighters in the ghetto — the young men and women organizing what would eventually become the first armed Jewish uprising of the war. He supplied them with forged papers. He brought them weapons when he could find them. He gave them money.

He did not do it for money. Not a single person who benefited from his help ever suggested he had. One of the resistance fighters he helped was a young poet named Abba Kovner. At a meeting on New Year's Eve 1941,Schmid warned Kovner about a name he had heard mentioned in German military circles — an SS officer who was coordinating the deportations across all of occupied Europe. "There is one dog called Eichmann," Schmid told him. "And he arranges everything." It was the first time Kovner had heard the name.
He was arrested in January 1942. Someone had reported him — nobody ever found out who. He was court-martialed by the German Army on February 25, one of only three Wehrmacht soldiers ever executed for helping Jews.

Before he died he wrote a final letter to Stefanie. He told her what he had seen at Ponary. He told her why he had done what he did. And then he wrote: "I have just acted as a human and I did not want to hurt anyone." He had also told a Jewish resistance fighter, sometime in those last months: "We all must die. But if I can choose whether to die as a murderer or a helper, I choose death as a helper." He was executed by firing squad on April 13, 1942. He was forty-two years old. When word reached the Vilna Ghetto that he was dead, the Jews there said Kaddish for him — the mourner's prayer, the prayer said for the dead. They said it for a German soldier.
After the war, Stefanie Schmid was harassed by her neighbours in Vienna. They called her late husband a traitor and smashed her windows. Austria refused to recognizeSchmid as a victim of Nazism, which meant his widow and daughter received no government support. They lived in poverty for years until a Jewish survivor heard about it and traveled to Vienna to tell them what Anton had done.
In 1961, nineteen years after his death, Abba Kovner stood at the witness stand at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and told the courtroom about Anton Schmid. He described what Schmid had done: the trucks, the forged papers, the help given to the resistance — and the courtroom went completely silent.

Hannah Arendt was in the audience to cover the trial for The New Yorker. She wrote afterward: "During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom — it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmid. 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 — how utterly different everything would be today if only more such stories could have been told."