During the early years of WWII, the Soviets invaded and occupied the independent country of Lithuania in the Baltics. In June of 1941, the Germans turned on their ally and invaded the Soviet Union, including Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population was Jewish.
Vilnius, Lithuania Old Town Skyline. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia
By late summer 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s elite killing squads, began escorting Jewish men, women, and children to large pits in the Ponary Forest outside Vilnius to shoot them. The Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews as well as Poles and Russians in this forest.
When World War II began, thirty-nine-year-old German shopkeeper Toni Schmid from Vienna, Austria, was drafted into the German army. Schmid did not support the Nazis or Hitler but was a deeply committed Christian. Schmid was a sergeant and ran an army post behind German troops for soldiers who were stragglers or were separated from their units. In 1941 he was sent to Vilnius where he witnessed SS troops murdering Jewish children. Horrified, he wanted to help the Jews but didn’t know how.
One night Sergeant Schmid walked down a dark street in Vilnius, and a desperate, young Jewish woman stepped out of the shadows and begged him to protect her from the SS death squads. He took her to his apartment for the night and the following day to a Catholic priest he knew.
The priest issued the woman a certificate of membership from his church. Schmid helped her obtain an official identity card and an apartment to rent. He told the German officials that she was a civilian employee from his military unit and the Soviets had taken her documents when they retreated.
Sergeant Schmid helped a young Jewish man also hiding from the death squads. Schmid gave him a German army uniform and the military identity papers of a German soldier who’d died, but his death hadn’t been reported. Then Schmid installed the young man as a military aide in his office.
One of Schmid’s duties was to oversee workshops manned by convalescing German soldiers, Russian POW’s, and Jews with skills needed for the war effort. Although he was only allowed to employ fifteen Jews, Schmid hired dozens to work in the shops.
Site of the Ponary massacre, where the German Nazis and their collaborators executed up to 100,000 people of various nationalities. About 70,000 of them were Jews. Photo by Avi1111 DR. AVISHAI TEICHER. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Under the cover of darkness, Schmid visited the Vilnius ghetto and supplied the Jews with food, medicine, and baby bottles filled with milk he had kept warm in his pockets. He warned the ghetto residents when Nazi raids were about to take place. Some of Schmid’s Jewish workers were caught in roundups, but he went to the local prison and obtained their release. He hid Jews in the back of covered trucks headed for German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, hoping they would be safer there than in Lithuania.
Sergeant Schmid secretly advised the leaders of a Jewish resistance movement in the Vilnius ghetto. He helped transport Jewish resistance fighters out of the city, warned them of pending German operations, and even supplied them with stolen German weapons. He also permitted resistance members to meet in his apartment.
Schmid’s good deeds did not escape the notice of the Gestapo, and agents began following him. One day they raided his apartment while he was visiting the ghetto. Some of Schmid’s soldiers located him before he arrived home and warned him that Gestapo agents were waiting at his apartment. Schmid fled, but the Nazis caught him after several weeks and sentenced him to death.
Prior to his arrest, Sergeant Schmid had assisted almost 300 Jews to escape the Nazis in Lithuania. On April 13, 1942, he was executed by a Nazi firing squad. The last words out of his mouth were the Lord’s Prayer.
The night before his execution, Sergeant Schmid wrote a letter to his wife and daughter in Austria.
“‘I am informing you, my dearest that I must depart from this world, I am sentenced to death. Please remain strong and trust in our dear God, who decides the destiny of each of us….Now I close my last lines, the last I can write to you, and send my love.’”
Sergeant Schmid took to heart Christ’s teaching that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But Sergeant Schmid went one step further – he gave his life for strangers.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
Poland became a killing ground for both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens during WWII, but the Germans specifically targeted Poland’s three million Jews. Those who weren’t immediately shot during the German invasion in 1939 were relocated from the countryside and placed in dozens of ghettos in cities all over Poland. Gradually the SS death squads emptied the ghettos by deporting the residents to death camps or by shooting them on the spot.
On July 26, 1942, an unusual confrontation took place between German Wehrmacht officers and SS troops in the city of Przemysl in southern Poland.
General Curt L. Freiherr von Gienanth, district commander of the Wehrmacht (regular German troops) had just appointed Major Max Liedtke to command the German garrison in Przemysl. Liedtke, a WWI veteran and son of a Lutheran pastor, was opposed to the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews.
In civilian life, Liedtke had lost his post as editor-in-chief of a daily German newspaper and was blacklisted because of his stand against the Nazis. In spite of this, in 1939, Liedtke was recalled to serve as a major in the Wehrmacht. He’d most recently served in Greece.
At Przemysl, Major Liedtke promoted the humane treatment of Jews. General von Gienanth supported Liedtke’s position and put four thousand Jews from Przemysl to work in local armament factories, protecting them and their families from the SS.
Liedtke’s adjutant, Oberleutnant Albert Battel, also despised the Nazi persecution of Jews. Battel was a middle-aged attorney and veteran of WWI who’d been reprimanded by the Nazis for befriending Jews and for treating the Jewish leaders of the Przemysl ghetto with respect. On July 26, 1942, Battel informed Liedtke that a large death squad of SS troops was approaching the bridge over the San River for the purpose of rounding up Jews.
Liedtke and Battel devised a plan to delay the SS long enough to rescue the Jewish workers and their families and to notify General von Gienanth of the situation. Liedtke hoped the general would agree with their plans not to cooperate with the SS death squads. Under Liedtke’s orders, Battel sent Wehrmacht troops to the bridge, erected barricades, mounted heavy machine guns, and put a tough army sergeant major in command.
Truckloads of SS troops arrived at the bridge and halted. Their commanding officer was told that no traffic would be admitted because the city was under a military emergency. The commander protested and ordered that the barricade be removed, but the sergeant major stood firm. He informed the SS officer that he would order his troops to fire on anyone attempting to break through the roadblock, so the SS left.
Major Liedtke ordered Battel to lead Wehrmacht troops into the Jewish ghetto, load the Jewish workers and their families onto trucks, and bring them to the Wehrmacht garrison for protection. Battel succeeded in moving more than one hundred families before new orders arrived from headquarters. General von Gienanth had argued with the high command that the Jews were needed for war labor, but Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler overruled him.
Himmler’s response was ominous. “‘I have ordered that ruthless steps be taken against all those who think that they can use the interest of war industry to cloak their real intentions to protect the Jews.’”
SS troops arrived at the Przemysl Ghetto the next day and deported more than fourteen thousand Jewish men, women, and children to death camps. Eventually the Jews at the Wehrmacht garrison were shipped to death camps as well.
The Nazis forced General von Gienanth to retire. They discharged Oberleutnant Albert Battel from the Wehrmacht and drafted him into the German homeguard, the Volkssturm. They sent Major Liedtke to the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. He was captured by the Soviets in 1944, declared a war criminal, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in a Soviet labor camp. The stand taken by these officers is the only known time that German regular army troops stood up to SS troops to protect the Jews.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
