# Andreas Schmidt (politician)

Andreas Schmidt (24 May 1912 - spring 1948) was a Transylvanian-Saxon politician, ethnic group leader, and later a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS). He served as Head of the German Ethnic Group in Romania (GEGR) from November 1940 to August 1944, and was also a Volksgruppenführer (ethnic group leader) of Romania from 27 September 1940 to August 1944. He was almost always described as doing "everything that served the interests of the German Reich".
Born into a powerful family Transylvanian Saxon from Mănărade, he initially studied law at Babeș-Bolyai University, but later dropped out. He then briefly served as a cavalryman in the Romanian Army, and by 1938 he left Romania to go to Germany, where he studied at the Agricultural University of Berlin. There he met many SS members, and he was trained to Nazify the ethnic Germans in Romania. Returning to Romania the following year, he took on three positions as a member of the SD, Head of Staff of the National Labour Front, and Representative of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMI). His most notable action as representative was recruiting 1,000 Romanian Germans and 500 Hungarian Germans to the SS for his father-in-law, Gottlob Berger.
On 27 September 1940, when he was 28, he was appointed Volksgruppenführer of Romania by Werner Lorenz. He also became Head of the German Ethnic Group in Romania (GEGR), which became the sole representative of ethnic Germans in Romania in November. In this role he often collaborated with Horia Sima and his father-in-law. Although he quickly attracted resentment from the ethnic Germans due to his anti-religious views and weak leadership, he continued to be the leader. In May 1943 he also negotiated an agreement between Romania and Germany allowing some ethnic Germans to go on short-term leave to volunteer with German troops. However, by early 1944, he lost influence within the Reich due to his closeness with Berger during his row with Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He was then accused of sexual harassment, excessive ambition, and making derogatory statements against Kaltenbrunner which led to him almost getting fired.
After the coup, Schmidt helped organize Operation Regulus to install an anti-Soviet resistance movement and organize a revolt in Romania. He visited many SD agents, but in mid-March 1945 his false identity was revealed to the Soviets by a legionnare named Alexandru Ţăranu. His plane was shot down over Miskolcz, and he was transported to Moscow. He was afterwards transferred to Vorkutlag, where he died in the spring of 1948, likely due to the prison administration ordering prisoners to beat him to death with axes. However, there were multiple versions of his death due to the uncertainty surrounding it.

## Early life

Andreas Schmidt was born on 24 May 1912 in Donnersmarkt, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary (now Mănărade, Alba County, Romania). He was part of the ethnic minority of Transylvanian Saxons in Romania. His parents were Georg Schmidt and Maria Schmidt née Simonis were both farmers, his mother descended from people who had long lived in the village in high positions.
After finishing elementary school, he attended Stephan Ludwig Roth Gymnasium in Mediasch from 1923 to 1929. However, due to his poor grades at Stephan Ludwig and not graduating with his abitur, he had to attend St. Vasile Gymnasium in Blasendorf from 1929 to 1930. During his time at Vasile, he was described by his classmate as "a less talented young man with shabby clothes who had swapped the Gymnasium in Mediasch for the one in Blasendorf because he had repeatedly failed in Mediasch." After graduating from Vasile, he attended Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca studying law, but he did not graduate. He then volunteered for the Romanian Army. He was a cavalryman in the army together with Andreas Rührig, his later chief of staff. He also made his first political contacts during this time in 1930 when he was working at the voluntary labor camps, eventually in 1932 becoming camp commander. He spent, around 1933, some time with Richard Langer in Cincu, who was close to the Artaman League and the German People's Party in Romania.
Schmidt claimed that by three years later, in 1935, he was part of party leadership. This occurred after a power struggle in 1935 when the radical wing of the Nazi movement around Fritz Fabritius split creating the radical Nazi DVR under Alfred Bonfert and Waldemar Gust and more moderate Nazis around Fabritius, but he does not take a leading position in either.
In 1938, he decided to leave Romania to go to Germany, where he studied at the Agricultural University of Berlin. There he met many Schutzstaffel (SS) members, and he was trained to Nazify the ethnic Germans in Romania. In 1939 he returned to Romania as a voluntary member of the SD in Foreign Intelligence (Amt VI) and Head of Staff of the National Labour Front.

## Political career
### Representative of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMI)

Returning to Romania in 1939, he then became a Representative of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMI), fulfilling various roles. VoMI was meant to represent the Volksdeutsche - ethnic Germans outside of the Third Reich - and implementing Lebensraum.
In this role, he recruited 1,000 Romanian Germans and 500 Hungarian Germans to the SS for his father-in-law, Gottlob Berger. They were encouraged to join in the columns of the Deutsche Zeitung, with the Zeitung publishing war letters form ethnic German SS volunteers that glorified their units. They were recruited under the pretext of being farm workers in the Reich although they were actually joining the SS, as it was illegal to border cross and it violated the volunteers' military service obligation to Romania with them deserting. Franz Anton Basch, a Volksgruppenführer, opposed this because he said it would have serious consequences for the Volksbund led by Basch, alongside most of the VoMI even though it was approved by the German government. Schmidt also met with Hans Otto Roth, a member of the Romanian Parliament, in order to carry this out.
In April 1940 he also helped the radical group between two German ethnic groups in Banat achieve power after a dispute. In August 1940 in accordance with the Second Vienna Award, Transylvania was divided and Schmidt's territory was now in the Romanian part. The German Ethnic Group was given the status of a "legal person" along with the competence to make "mandatory decisions" for the German minority in Romania.

### Volksgruppenführer

On 27 September 1940, then 28-year-old Schmidt was appointed a Volksgruppenführer (ethnic group leader) of Romania by the head of the VoMI, Werner Lorenz. He appointed Andreas Rührig, his friend since the army, as his deputy and staff leader. On 15 October 1940 Schmidt issued for an order for all German youths from age 10 to compulsory be conscripted to the Deutsche Jugend in Romania, and by 1944 it had some 74,000 members. The NSDAP of the German Ethnic Group in Romania (GEGR) became the sole representative of ethnic Germans in November, which he was appointed in charge of.
He also often collaborated with Horia Sima, the acting commander of the Iron Guard, with Schmidt arranging for the appointment of members of the Volksgruppe as mayors of Sibiu and Mediaș and on the appointment of gauleiters before the rebellion. Some people he recruited also went to espionage school and returned to Romania as "permissionaries", assigned to intelligence services or at Andr's disposal.
Schmidt soon proved himself as a contact person during the Legionnary Uprising of Iron Guard members, an uprising he called "racially determined" and so he recommended that the influence of the German Reich become more strong in order for there to be tranquility. He was also very willing to serve the Reich because of his need for power, describing them as a counteract to the racial inability, and so he formulated the German ethnic group to have unconditional readiness for the Reich. As early as summer of 1942 a rapprochement with the Romanian population occurred among the ethnic Germans due to dissatisfaction with Schmidt and his leadership, which was only heightened by the defeat at Stalingrad. It was also driven by his anti-religious and anti-Christian views, with a notable example being him renouncing the religious service at his wife's funeral. He also helped stir up anti-German resentment by promoting the rights of ethnic Germans, even among the Iron Guard.
He helped negotiate the 12 May 1943 agreement between the Reich government and the Romanian government where Romanian-Germans were allowed a short-team leave to go volunteer with German troops.
By early 1944 there was a split between Berger and Ernst Kaltenbrunner within the Volksgruppe leadership, which led to Schmidt having to force members of his staff to draw away from Berger because he promoted Berger's interests. This led to dissidents of Berger, Kurt Auner and Matthias Liebhardt launching a smear campaign against Schmidt, and Schmidt threatened to arrest both even though they were protected by Kaltenbrunner. He also started to lose favor because of an internal complaint later that year, as he was described as having excessive ambition by his coworkers, playing off individual Reich authorities against each other, sexual harassment, and making repeated statements against Kaltenbrunner. This led to authorities in the Reich recommending he be terminated from his office, although he was given the chance of rehabilitation during Operation Regulus. In June 1944 when many Swabians returned home from the front, they openly protested against the GEGR, stating they had been misled and lied to us when volunteering and blamed Schmidt.

#### Writings as Volksgruppenführer

During his time as Volksgruppenführer, Schmidt wrote three books. The books were Nationalsozialistischer Volkstumskampf (National Socialist People's Struggle, 1942), Wir erziehen das neue Geschlecht! (We Educate the New Sex!, 1942), and Der Sieg des Sozialismus in Europa (The Victory of Socialism in Europe, 1944). They were all published by Krafft & Drotleff in Sibiu. His 1942 and 1944 books were put on the original literature to be discraded list, which was a list by the DDV of the Soviet-occupied Germany that confiscated literature related to the Nazi era, along with "We Educate the New Sex!", which was republished in 1943, in the first addendum published a year later.

### Coup d'état and resistance

On 23 August 1944 the Romanian coup d'état occurred where Ion Antonescu was overthrown, and on 12 September an armistice was signed with the Soviets.
After the coup, Schmidt played an important role in a mission titled "Operation Regulus [ro]". This was ordered by the Reich in order to rehabilitate Schmidt, because of his reaction to Kaltenbrunner and for "abandoning" the ethnic group at a critical moment. His adversaries also accused him of delibrately ignoring the possibility of a German defeat, yet making arrangements for the evacuation of the ethnic German population in Transylvania, and because he left Romania on 21 August 1944 for Berlin and Vienna, which led to others to accuse him of fleeing to the Reich in anticipation of the coup. Operation Regulus was to be carried out by Legionnaires and German military, and the objectives were to contact circles in Romania who did not like Soviet occupation who remained in Romanian territory, collect and pass on information about the Red Army and the atmosphere in the country, and organize a pro-German, anti-Soviet resistance movement and organize a revolt. He proposed a partisan war behind Soviet lines, modeled after Operation Landfried, to have GEG leaders at the service of Otto Skorzeny and have them trained to parachute into Transylvania as commando units and get into contact with the SD.
On the night of 6 to 7 November 1944, he took part in the first jump of the operation to go to Brașov then to Bucharest and meet with SD agents Roland Gunne and Fritz Kloos. On 10 November 1944 Schmidt left Transylvania together with the legionary commander Stoicănescu and Iron Guard member Codreanu. His plane, however, crashed in southern Hungary but he went by foot 170 km to the Fagaras Mountains, where he stayed into February of 1945, although he continued to frequent Brașov, Sibiu, and Bucharest. In an interrogation during March 1945 he said that the plane had been hit by Soviet rockets in Arad and caught on fire, so they tried to return to Vienna but they had to emergency parachute out of the plane.
He secretly left from Brașov on 9 February under the alias "caporal Bâtlan". In mid-March 1945, together with a Romanian lieutenant pilot from the Luftwaffe, he tried to reach Germany from Oradea but they were forced to land over Miskolcz, breaking both of his legs and he had to go to a military hospital. Their plane had crashed because a secret agent, a legionnare named Alexandru Ţăranu, revealed their identities as both were under false identities, which led to SMERSH intervening with two Romanian IAR 80 planes, causing a fire on board as it passed Debrecen. He was recognized at the military hospital, and was transported to Moscow. When they were taken to Moscow Schmidt was taken to Lubyanka prison for interrogation and then tried and condemned by Soviet tribunals.

## Personal life

On 3 March 1941 he married Krista Berger in Berlin, she was the daughter of Gottlob Berger who was Head of the SS and responsible for recruiting SS members. Heinrich Himmler was his best man. They were both involved in a serious car crash in 1942, which led to her having serious injuries, but she gave birth a few months later to a son named Heidrun and died on 11 November 1942 from tuberculosis. However, it is theorized that this car crash never happened, and it was instead an attempt to hide that Berger had been suffering from lung disease, which was untenable to the SS and would've exposed Himmler. He re-married in 1944 to Adele Kaufmes at the Bristol hotel in Vienna after Berger's death. Kaufmes was born in 1924 as the daughter of a regional farm leader named Hans Kaufmes. Soon after, on 23 August, she gave birth to a son named Andreas.

### Death

Schmidt died sometime in spring 1948 at Vorkutlag. It has been speculated that his death was the result of the prison's administration ordering some prisoners to beat him to death with axes during the night. Vladimir Sergeyevich Belkin, a Russian citizen, later relayed this and said that he had stood near the body alongside some night cooks after the murderers had left. A rumor, however, then spread the next day that Schmidt had died of typhus, which was rampant in the camp. Later reports said he was free and living in Moscow around 1951 as an advisor to the Soviets, but this is more than likely legend, and another version said he died in 1952 in a concentration camp in the Donbass from tuberculosis.