Austrian soldier Anton Schmid was executed for rescuing Jews from the Ponary massacre in Vilnius.

Anton Schmid was an Austrian Wehrmacht recruit who saved Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania. A devout but apolitical Roman Catholic and an electrician by profession, Schmid was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and later into the Wehrmacht during World War II.

The Ponary massacre, or the Paneriai massacre, was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and the Lithuanian Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 2,000 Poles, 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.