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Paul Schmidt (23 June 1899-21 April 1970) was an interpreter in the German Foreign Ministry from 1923 to 1945.
Biography[]
Paul Schmidt was born in Berlin, German Empire in 1899, and he served in the Imperial German Army during World War I, during which he was wounded on the Western Front. After the war, he studied modern languages and worked for an American newspaper agency, and he became an interpreter for the Foreign Office at the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague in 1923. In 1924, he became an interpreter for the Foreign Office in Berlin, serving at the League of Nations from 1926 to 1933, at the London Economic Conference in 1933, and chief intepreter for Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945. He interpreted between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier at the Munich Conference in 1938, and he also translated the British declaration of war in 1939 and the surrender of France in 1940. In 1941, he also translated Hitler's meeting with Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, where he persuaded Antonescu to create a Romanian equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen to take part in the "war of extermination" against the Soviet Union. He joined the Nazi Party in 1943, and he was arrested by the Americans in 1945 and released in 1948. He founded the Sprachen & Dolmetscher Institut in Munich in 1952, and he retired in 1967 and died in 1970.