Anton Schmid-Promenade

The footpath along the left bank of the Danube Canal was named on 10 September 2002 after the Wehrmacht soldier and resistance fighter Anton Schmid. Anton Schmid ran a radio shop in Vienna, and was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1938. He was in charge of the collection point for stragglers at the station in Wilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), where he was responsible for gathering soldiers who had become separated from their units. He employed approximately 140 Jews in the workshops connected to his collection point, whom he protected from murder and partly freed after their arrest. He transported around three hundred Jews from Wilna to relatively safe areas or ghettos in Woronowo, Grodno, Bialystok and Lida with his Wehrmacht trucks. Jewish families in the ghetto in Wilna were supplied with food by him. Finally, he smuggled leading figures of the Jewish resistance movement as far as Warsaw. Eventually, he was arrested and sentenced to death by the military court of the field command of the Wehrmacht in Wilna on 25 February 1942, and was executed on 13 April 1942.