Schmidt directed the establishment of the Missionary Ethnological Museum in Rome (1922–1926) under the authorization of Pope Pius XI, and from 1927 to 1939 Schmidt was director of the museum. After the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, Schmidt resettled with the Anthropos Institute in Switzerland and became a professor at the University of Fribourg (1939–1951). On February 10, 1954, Schmidt died in Fribourg, Switzerland; he was buried at the seminary in Mödling. Schmidt was a member of many scholarly societies and held honorary degrees from six universities.
Schmidt's Works
Schmidt began his linguistic studies by examining the native languages of New Guinea, but he soon expanded his field of research to include all of Oceania. He showed the relationships between the Austronesian languages and a certain group of the Southeast Asian mainland that Schmidt called "Austroasiatic" languages. His study Die Mon-Kmer-Völker: Ein Bindeglied zwischen Völkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens (The Mon-Khmer peoples: A link between peoples in central Asia and Austronesia, 1906) was of particular importance.
Schmidt's interest gradually shifted to ethnology. In 1910 he published a book on Pygmy peoples, Die Stellung der Pygmäenvölker in der Entwicklungsgeschichte Menschen (The place of Pygmies in the historical development of man), and in 1924 he published Völker und Kulturen, which he wrote with Wilhelm Koppers.
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