Enraged, the enemy officer drew his pistol and pressed it to the prisoner’s forehead. He demanded to know which of the captured men in his custody belonged to a particular religion/ethnicity, one that his government and military intended to eradicate entirely. The prisoner could have given in to that immediate threat of death, sacrificed some of his comrades to guarantee his own survival, maybe even the survival of a majority of his fellow POWs.

Instead, the young man from Tennessee refused to point out which of his fellow American troops were Jews to the German officer pointing a pistol at his head. In the end, the German caved and holstered his weapon.

Thus, US Army Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds saved hundreds of his fellow Soldiers from torture and execution at the hands of the Nazi regime and its Holocaust. And while Edmonds has received several well-earned honors over the years, he’s now set to earn (albeit posthumously) the highest decoration an American in uniform can receive: the Medal of Honor.

Roddie Edmonds World War II Service and Capture

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1919, Roderick “Roddie” Edmonds enlisted in the United States Army in 1941. Despite serving in the armed forces from the early days of the Second World War, Edmonds didn’t wind up deploying overseas until late 1944.

He and the rest of his unit (a regiment of the 106th Infantry Division) arrived just in time to take part in the legendary Battle of the Bulge. Fought between December 16th, 1944, and January 25th, 1945, the engagement was the result of Germany’s last-ditch attempt to launch an offensive to push back the Allied forces advancing ever closer to their border.

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Centered around the Belgian town of Bastogne, the two armies battled fiercely for over a month across a 75-mile front during the bitter cold of winter, amid the dense woodland of the Ardennes forest.

Both sides suffered brutal casualties, including large numbers of troops taken prisoner by the opposing army. Among them were several thousand Soldiers of the 106th, including Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds.

Roddie Edmonds at Stalag IX-A

Taken prisoner along with most of his division, mere days after the Battle of the Bulge began, Edmonds eventually wound up at POW camp Stalag IX-A near the central German town of Trutzhain after a journey of many weeks with little to eat or drink.

As the highest-ranking man among his recently captured comrades, camp personnel designated him as their de facto leader. Shortly after their arrival, the Germans announced over the camp’s loudspeakers that all Jewish prisoners were to form up outside the barracks the next morning. While the full extent of Nazi Germany’s genocidal operations was not widely known at that point in the war, their overtly antisemitic policies and widespread rumors of greater atrocities were no secret.

Thus, Edmonds, a born and raised devout Methodist, clearly knew better than to expose his Jewish comrades. On his orders, every single recently captured American Soldier turned up in formation the next morning with Edmonds at their head. Seeing the entirety of the American POW contingent lined up, the camp’s commandant flew into a rage, shouting, “They cannot all be Jews!” Edmonds’ calm, collected response: “We are all Jews here.”

The German responded by drawing his pistol and aiming it squarely at Edmonds’ head. Rather than panicking or giving in, the young Tennessean said,

“According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give 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.”

Confronted with those facts, the would-be homicidal/genocidal German officer backed down. The American prisoners went back to their barracks, among them around 200 Jews, safe from Nazi persecution and execution. US troops liberated the camp and its many Allied prisoners, Edmonds among them, on March 30th, 1945. A date that, coincidentally, marked the second day of Passover, the annual Jewish holiday celebrating the Hebrews’ liberation from slavery in Ancient Egypt.

Roddie Edmonds’ Life After WWII

Although he returned home to Tennessee at the end of the war, Roddie Edmonds wasn’t out of uniform for long. He returned to the Army and served in the Korean War before leaving the military for a second and final time, returning to his hometown of Knoxville for good.

Over the following decades, he made his living primarily as a salesman until passing away in 1985 at the age of 65. And in all that time, he never told anyone what he did that fateful morning at Stalag-IX-A.

It took decades for the details of his courageous stand to become public knowledge and for Master Sergeant Edmonds to begin earning his justly deserved laurels.

US Army Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, Righteous Among the Nations

By most accounts, the first public acknowledgement of Edmonds’ heroism harkens back to a rather random source: a 2008 New York Times article about former President Richard Nixon’s struggle to purchase an NYC home in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Among those who played a part in the (complicated and otherwise unrelated) story was attorney Lester J. Tanner. In laying out the lawyer’s backstory, the Times included the following anecdote:

As a G.I. in World War II, Mr. Tanner had been taken prisoner by the Germans and was being held in the Ziegenheim stalag in January 1945, when the Nazi commandant demanded at gunpoint to know which of the American soldiers were Jews. As. Mr. Tanner recalled it, their brave officer, Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds defied the camp commander, saying the Geneva Convention forbade the request, and Mr. Tanner and his fellow prisoners were spared, to be liberated shortly afterward.

Roddie’s own son Chris, a Baptist pastor, first learned of his father’s deed when he stumbled across this article while helping his daughter with a school project the year after its publication. And the spread of Roddie’s recognition did not end there.

In 2015 Yad Vashem (Israel’s official institution dedicated to memorializing the Holocaust, its victims, and survivors) recognized Edmonds as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, an honorary title given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during those years of vicious, organized genocide. As of now, he’s one of only five American recipients of the title and the only member of the US Armed Forces. A title he unquestionably earned by risking his life to protect his comrades from what was then a suspiciously ominous fate.

Because whatever suspicions Allied troops like Edmondson held at the time, only after the true horrors of the Holocaust became common knowledge did most people truly understood the additional risks run by those of Jewish faith and/or heritage who served against the Nazis (among them Marvin Brown, who served on the front lines in Europe in a US Army tank destroyer battalion and just so happens to be this author’s great uncle) and faced potential capture.

A Medal of Honor for Roddie Edmonds

While the honor bestowed upon Roddie by Yad Vashem is indeed a worthy one, people here in the United States (among them his con Chris) pushed for the late Master Sergeant to receive an American military decoration to recognize his gallantry. Specifically, the Medal of Honor. While the struggle for President Barack Obama recounted Edmonds’ story in several speeches, and President Donald Trump did the same during his speech at the 2019 Veterans Day Parade, his chances of receiving the MoH remained unclear. Which is why on April 20th (which, in a bizarre and nauseating coincidence that my fellow history super-nerds are likely aware of, is a date of supreme importance to white supremacists because it’s Adolf Hitler’s birthday) of 2023, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn (R) introduced legislation to award Edmonds a Congressional Gold Medal.

The measure didn’t go anywhere, thankfully, and proved moot before long. Last week, President Trump announced he would at long last posthumously award Master Sergeant Edmonds the Medal of Honor, a just coda to a tale of how courage, loyalty, and service can unite people from a variety of backgrounds and faiths.

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