“Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?”
“No, but I served in a company of heroes.”
—Stephen Ambrose, Band of Brothers
In 1998, television anchorman and journalist Tom Brokaw authored The Greatest Generation, a book profiling many of those unsung heroes of World War II. Not included among those featured was a man named Roderick W. Edmonds from South Knoxville. Born in 1919, “Roddie” grew up in the Methodist Church. After graduating from Knoxville High School, he enlisted in the Army on March 17, 1941, and trained at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.
In December of 1944, some six months after D-Day when the Allied Forces landed in Europe, the 106th Infantry Division, which included Master Sergeant Edmonds, arrived in Germany. Five days later, Adolf Hitler, desperate to change the tide of the war, launched a last gasp counteroffensive in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge, a conflict which eventually lasted over a month and involved over a million participants from both sides. The battle began with a surprise attack by the Nazis. The Allies were caught off guard, and, on December 19th, when the inexperienced troops of the 106th were surrounded and outgunned, the commanding officer surrendered. Edmonds was among some 20,000 captives, all of whom were required to march over 30 miles to a railway station, squeezed into boxcars, and transported to Stalag IX-B, a Nazi camp which housed more than 25,000 prisoners of war.
According to a Time Magazine article written ten years ago, the prisoners were offered neither food nor water along the way. Several died. Most survived by eating snow. Upon their arrival, the Nazis isolated the Jewish American prisoners, placed them in lice-ridden segregated barracks, and offered starvation rations. After a few days, the Germans separated the officers and sent Edmonds and some 1,275 enlisted personnel from his division to Stalag IX-A, a prison camp near the town of Ziegenhain. As the senior non-commissioned officer, Edmonds was charged with the responsibility for each of the POWs.
At this point in the war, Hitler had implemented a policy known as the Final Solution, a gruesome initiative which had tortured and put to death over six million Jews– some sources say even more — by the end of the war in Europe. The Final Solution was not intended to spare Jewish-American POWs. So, on their first day at Stalag IX-A, the Germans directed all American Jews to fall out in the next morning’s roll call. After this announcement, Edmonds, mindful of the Nazi death camps, developed a plan for all 1,275 of the troops to step forward rather than just the 200 or so Jews in his command.
So on the following morning when every one of the POWs appeared, the German Commandant, a Major Siegmann, was furious. Addressing Edmonds, Siegmann shrieked, “These men cannot all be Jews!”
“We are all Jews,” Edmonds calmly responded. Private Paul Stern, one of the terrified Jewish POWs, stood next to Edmonds during this confrontation. Enraged by Edmonds’s claim, Siegmann placed his luger to Edmonds’s forehead and shouted, “I am commanding you to order all Jewish men to step forward or I will shoot you on this spot!”
Some seventy years later, when interviewed about the incident, Stern and other witnesses recalled Edmonds’s words as he courageously faced his likely death, “If you shoot, you will have to kill all of us because we know who you are, and you will have to stand trial for war crimes after we win this war.”
In this anxious moment, Siegmann hesitated only briefly before shoving his weapon into its holster, and angrily walking away. Edmonds and his troops were spared. Two months later, on the second day of Passover, the Jewish holiday of liberation, the United States Army arrived and freed the American captives there.
Edmonds, who after the war returned to Knoxville and fathered two sons, never told his family about the incident at the Stalag IX-A prisoner of war camp. After his death in 1985, Edmonds’s wife, Mary Ann, gave his son Chris, by then a Baptist minister, the diaries Edmonds kept during his time as a prisoner of war. When he discovered a reference to his father’s encounter with the POW commandant, he contacted several of those who were within earshot of the exchange. Sonny Fox, a Jew who had become a television executive after the war, confirmed Edmonds’s act of heroism, as did attorney Lester Tanner, and others. When interviewed by CNN a decade or so ago, Stern, then 90 years old, praised his master sergeant. “I was so proud of him. He was so brave to say, ‘We are all Jews here.’”
It was not until 2015 that Roddie Edmonds received a proper tribute. In that year, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, bestowed its highest honor to Edmonds, an award given only to those who had risked their lives to save Jews during the war years. He was only the fifth American so recognized. In a ceremony held at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., then President Barack Obama delivered the “Righteous Among Nations Medal” to Chris Edmonds on behalf of his father.
Because Edmonds’s act of bravery was not technically in combat, he was ineligible to receive the Medal of Honor. In an effort to properly acknowledge his gallant deed, Congressman Jimmy Duncan introduced a bill in 2016 to award Edmonds with the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the two highest civilian awards in the U.S. In 2017, Republicans Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker joined two of their Democratic colleagues to introduce similar legislation in the Senate. Despite nonpartisan support, the measure has languished in committee. In 2021, Congressman Tim Burchett re-introduced the bill in hopes of success. So far, he is far short of the requisite votes in the House.
Roddie Edmonds is among those men and women who, after enduring the Great Depression and offering their lives in defense of their country, qualified their generation as America’s best. Brokaw’s words resonate: “This is, I believe, the greatest generation our society has ever produced – those who joined in the war effort and who fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the right thing to do.”