Hans Schmidt (wrestler)
Canadian professional wrestler (1925–2012)
Guy Larose (7 February 1925 – 26 May 2012), better known by his ring name Hans Schmidt, was a Canadian professional wrestler famous in the 1950s and 1960s. His gimmick of a German pseudo-Nazi heel gained him considerable notoriety, and popularized the proliferation of similar gimmicks through Canadian and American wrestling.
Early life
Larose was born in Joliette, Quebec, in 1925 and was an amateur wrestler in his youth. He initially pursued a career in law enforcement but dropped out of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s training academy after being disillusioned by its treatment of Indigenous people.
Wrestling career
Larose used a background in amateur wrestling to break into the pro-business after World War II, wrestling as a babyface under his name with modest success early on. Then, in 1951, the Boston-area promoter Paul Bowser, who thought the tall, naturally balding Franco-Québécois looked like a German, renamed him Hans Schmidt. Playing the character of an 'evil German', Schmidt became one of the first great heels of televised wrestling in the 1950s, drawing the hatred of fans as he battled their American babyface heroes of the squared circle. In the 1998 A&E documentary The Unreal Story of Professional Wrestling, Hans Schmidt was labeled "the classic foreign villain" - tapping into lingering anti-German sentiment in America following World War II, Schmidt was a forerunner of many other wrestling characters that successfully used the "anti-American foreigner" gimmick to enrage the crowd, such as Nikolai Volkoff and The Iron Sheik.
Nicknamed The Teuton Terror, Schmidt wrestled a rough, aggressive, scientific style, often with rule-breaking. He often finished his opponents off with a backbreaker, and was also known to use the piledriver as well.
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