By: Ricki Prince
Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds was born in 1919 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He courageously served his country in the American Army during both WWII and the Korean War. During WWII, Edmonds participated in the allied invasion of Europe. In December 1944, as part of the 106th Infantry Division – consisting of the 422nd, 423rd, and 424th Regiments – Edmonds landed in France and travelled across the country and into Belgium, near the German border. He fought in the now famous Battle of the Bulge, in which the Germans captured thousands of American soldiers. Edmonds and the other members of the 422nd Regiment, in which he was a member, were taken captive. They were then forced to march to Gerolstein, Germany where they were placed in cattle cars and shipped off to Bad Orb, Germany. The journey took four days, and the POWs were not provided with any sustenance. After several weeks in Bad Orb, the group was divided into three groups: officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men. As part of the noncommissioned group, Edmond was deported to the Stalag IXA POW camp in Ziegenhain, Germany. Due to the lack of food, Edmond and several friends spent their spare time planning a restaurant to be opened postwar. The artistic Edmond drew the restaurant, and his drawings survived the war.
Now when it came to Jewish POWs, in classic Nazi fashion, they were regularly separated from their peers. In January 1945, the Nazis announced that all Jewish prisoners of the Stalag IXA POW camp must report the next morning. In great defiance of this order, Roddie Edmonds, who as the highest-ranking POW was in charge of the prisoners, made a decision that would change many lives. He refused to allow the Jews to turn themselves in and commanded every single one of them – over a thousand individuals – to report the next morning. When Major Siegmann, the Nazi officer in charge of the camp found that all the prisoners had lined themselves up, he was not amused. He turned to Edmonds and stated:
“They cannot all be Jews.”
Edmonds replied simply: “We are all Jews here.”
Major Siegmann, upset, pulled out his rifle and threatened Edmonds, but without a beat, Edmonds snapped back:
“According to the Geneva Convention, we have to give only our name, rank and serial number. If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us, and after the war you will be tried for war crimes.”
Not accustomed to his orders being disobeyed, Siegmann gave up. Through this unbelievably brave act of Roddie Edmonds, in which he risked his very life, he successfully saved the approximately 200 Jewish prisoners of his group. On March 30th, 1945, the American Army liberated Stalag IXA. It was an auspicious day – the second day of Passover – the holiday of freedom.
The family of Roddie Edmonds did not know much about his experiences during the war. All they knew is that he had been taken captive by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and survived to tell the tale. However, he did not tell his family his tale of rescue and when asked by his son Chris about his war experiences, Roddie Edmonds would reply that “some things were too difficult to talk about.” When his father passed away in 1985, Chris received from his mother two of his father’s diaries written as a POW, but the family was still not aware of the whole story.
In 2009, Lauren Edmonds, Chris’s daughter, was working on a college history project about her grandfather, Roddie Edmonds. Chris assisted his daughter by googling his father’s name, thinking he may find army documents. He was thoroughly confused when one of the results was a New York Times article about a lawyer by the name of Lester Tanner who had sold his home to Richard Nixon, the former American President. His confusion rapidly changed into shock when he read in the article that Tanner and other Jews were saved by Roddie Edmonds during the war. Chris managed to reach Tanner and other Jews whom his father had rescued. These former POWs and their families shared their stories with Chris, stories which he had never heard before.
From Lester Tanner (formerly Tannenbaum), the Edmonds family learned that Tanner and Roddie Edmonds had trained together. Tanner asserted that although Edmonds was the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in their group, he remained humble throughout their experiences together. Tanner viewed Edmonds as a “man of great courage who led his men with the same capacity we had come to know him in the States.”
Well aware that the Nazis were murdering Jews, Roddie Edmonds new that the separation of the Jewish POWs from the others did not bode well for these Jewish prisoners. In Ethics of the Fathers 2:5, it states: “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” Roddie Edmonds truly encapsulated this verse. In February 2015, he posthumously received the prestigious honour of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem. In January of the following year, a ceremony in the presence of American President Barack Obama, was held at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. At the emotional ceremony, Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer, and Yad Vashem Council Chairman (who is also a Holocaust survivor and the former Chief Rabbi of Israel), Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, presented Chris Edmonds with a medal and certificate in honour of his father.
Sources:
“Roddie Edmonds USA.” Yad Vashem, 2023. https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/edmonds.html.
Henry, Patrick. “We Are All Jews Here.” Tablet, May 28, 2021. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/roddie-edmonds-patrick-henry.
