In 1917 and 1918, Schmidt was a soldier in the First World War and was wounded on the Western Front. Later, he studied modern languages in Berlin and worked at the same time for an American newspaper agency. In 1921, he took courses in the Foreign Office for the training of conference interpreters. Schmidt distinguished himself there by virtue of his outstanding memory. In July 1923, Schmidt, still preparing for examinations, accepted his first assignment for the translating and interpreting service of the Foreign Office at the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague. He married in 1925 and had a son the following year.
Foreign Office
After more language study in Berlin, Schmidt worked briefly in the Reich Foreign Language Office. Starting in 1924, he worked as an interpreter in the Foreign Office. Schmidt interpreted during the Locarno Treaty meetings and participated in many other important international conferences. He served as an interpreter at the League of Nations and at the London Economic Conference. Under Reich ChancellorGustav Stresemann, Schmidt became chief interpreter, a position that he retained after Hitler came to power in 1933. Schmidt remained chief interpreter until 1945. At the Munich Conference, he interpreted between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier. Benito Mussolini was fluent in French but spoke a somewhat fractured, mangled German. Although Mussolini was not as good at German as he pretended to be, he always refused the use of a translator at his meetings with Hitler because of his vainglorious pride. During the war years, he served as Hitler's interpreter during his meetings with Marshal Philippe Pétain and General Francisco Franco. On 12 June 1941, Schmidt served as the translator for the summit between Hitler and General Ion Antonescu of Romania. Antonescu was fluent in French, but Hitler spoke no language other than German. At the summit, Antonescu spoke in French and had his remarks translated into German by Schmidt, who also translated Hitler's remarks into French. During the course of the meeting, Hitler, via Schmidt, informed Antonescu of the planned "war of extermination" that Operation Barbarossa was intended to be and asked that Anonescu set up a Romanian equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen, a request that Antonescu agreed to. The Israeli historian Jean Ancel wrote sarcastically about Schmidt's post-1945 claim to be a mere "extra on the stage of history" that Schmidt was surely being too modest here in downplaying his role at the Hitler-Antonescu summit that led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Schmidt fails to mention the genocidal plans discussed in the Hitler-Antonescu meetings but gives the misleading impression that German-Romanian talks during the war were entirely concerned with military and economic matters. After the 1942 Dieppe Raid resulted in thousands of Canadian soldiers captured, Schmidt was in charge of their interrogations. Schmidt joined the NSDAP in 1943.
Postwar
Arrested in May 1945, Schmidt was freed by the Americans in 1948. In 1946 he testified at the Nuremberg Trials, where conversations with him were noted down by psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn and later published. In 1947, he testified for the prosecution against the directors of IG Farben. In 1952 he founded the Sprachen & Dolmetscher Institut in Munich, a college in which students could learn languages and become translators and interpreters. He retired in 1967.
Memoirs
Entitled An Extra on the Diplomatic Stage, Schmidt's memoirs cover his 21 years as an important eyewitness to European foreign policy. They begin with his frontline experiences during the First World War at the German Spring Offensive of 1918 and continue with his work for the German chancellors before 1933. The English edition of the book, Hitler’s Interpreter, skips that material and describes only the Hitler years,. The memoirs present an atmospheric but detailed portrait of the highest level of the Third Reich. He has this advice for interpreters in training: "Over the years I have arrived at the conviction that a good diplomatic interpreter must possess three characteristics: Most important, he must, paradoxically, be able to be silent; he must be expert in the subject he is translating; and only in third place is his mastery of the language he translates".
