04/11/2026
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His name was Roddie Edmonds.
He was a Methodist from Knoxville, Tennessee.
He had been in Europe for six days when the Battle of the Bulge began.
Six days.
On December 19, 1944, surrounded and outgunned, his commanding officer surrendered. Edmonds and nearly 20,000 other Americans became prisoners of war. They were marched fifty kilometers in freezing cold — some dying along the way — then sealed into boxcars with seventy men in each, no food, no water, told to eat snow.
They arrived at Stalag IX-A, a German POW camp near Ziegenhain.
As the highest-ranking American noncommissioned officer in the camp, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds was in command of all 1,275 American prisoners. He kept a diary. He wrote down the names and addresses of every man under him.
In January 1945, the German commandant made an announcement.
All Jewish soldiers were to report separately the following morning.
Edmonds understood immediately. He and his men were aware of what the Germans were doing to Jewish prisoners. On the Eastern Front, captured Jewish soldiers had already been sent to extermination camps. Time
That evening, he gave his own order.
All of you. Every American. Outside in formation. Tomorrow morning.
When the commandant arrived and saw more than a thousand men standing in formation, he turned to Edmonds in fury.
"They cannot all be Jews!"
Edmonds looked at him and said four words:
"We are all Jews here."
The commandant drew his Luger.
He pressed it to Edmonds's forehead.
He told him that if he did not identify the Jewish soldiers immediately, he would be shot on the spot.
Edmonds did not move.
He told the commandant that the Geneva Convention required prisoners to give only their name, rank, and serial number — not their religion. He told him: "If you are going to shoot, you will have to shoot all of us. Because we know who you are, and when this war is over, you will be tried as a war criminal."
The commandant lowered his pistol.
He turned and walked away.
Approximately 200 Jewish-American soldiers remained safe among their fellow prisoners that day.
But Edmonds wasn't done.
Weeks later, as Allied forces were closing in and the war was clearly ending, the Germans ordered the entire camp to evacuate on a forced march through snow. Edmonds knew what that march would do to men who had spent months on starvation rations. He gathered his soldiers and told them: Get sick tonight. Eat dirt, grass, anything you can. Tomorrow when we fall out, we go back to our barracks and we tell them we're too sick to move.
The Germans raged. They threatened. In the end, they left the Americans behind in frustration. Nearly all the prisoners forced onto the march died. Every one of Edmonds's men who stayed behind was liberated alive by General Patton's troops on March 30, 1945. Mishpacha Magazine
Roddie Edmonds came home to Tennessee.
He never spoke about any of it.
He died in 1985. A humble church-going man, a loving father, a devoted patriot.
His family knew he had been a POW. They didn't know much more.
The story only survived by accident.
Years after his death, his son Chris was Googling his father's name and found an article — not about Roddie, but about Richard Nixon buying a Manhattan townhouse from a prominent New York lawyer named Lester Tanner. In passing, Tanner mentioned that a Master Sergeant named Roddie Edmonds had saved his life in a German POW camp during WWII.
That one sentence in a real estate article was the thread that unraveled everything.
Chris tracked down Tanner. He found other survivors. He heard, for the first time, what his father had done on January 27, 1945.
In 2015, Yad Vashem — Israel's Holocaust memorial — named Roddie Edmonds Righteous Among the Nations. He became the only American serviceman ever to receive that honor. Accidental Talmudist
In 2016, President Obama praised his actions as "above and beyond the call of duty."
In 2026, he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Eighty years after a Methodist man from Knoxville, Tennessee, stood in front of 1,275 soldiers with a gun pressed to his head and refused to step back.
One of the Jewish POWs he saved said afterward: "That such people can exist gives you hope for humanity."
They existed.
He was one of them.
And the world almost never knew.
Based on verified historical records, Wikipedia, Yad Vashem, and Military Times. Shared for educational and historical awareness.
