Greater Love Hath No Man

I had not heard this story – of a group of 1,000-odd American POWs who, at the behest of a quick-thinking master sergeant, all called themselves Jewish to protect the Jewish GIs among them.

The master sergeant – Roddie Edmonds, of Knoxville, who passed away thirty years ago – is now the fifth American to be inducted into the “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial:

At the time of Edmonds’s capture, the most infamous Nazi death camps were no longer fully operational, so Jewish American POWs were instead sent to slave labor camps where their chances of survival were low. US soldiers had been warned that Jewish fighters among them would be in danger if captured and were told to destroy dog tags or any other evidence identifying them as Jewish.

So when the German camp commander, speaking in English, ordered the Jews to identify themselves, Edmonds knew what was at stake.

Turning to the rest of the POWs, he said: “We are not doing that, we are all falling out,” recalled [MSGT Edmonds’ son] Chris Edmonds, who is currently in Israel participating in a seminar for Christian leaders at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies.

With all the camp’s inmates defiantly standing in front of their barracks, the German commander turned to Edmonds and said: “They cannot all be Jews.” To which Edmonds replied: “We are all Jews here.”

Then the Nazi officer pressed his pistol to Edmonds head and offered him one last chance. Edmonds merely gave him his name, rank and serial number as required by the Geneva Conventions.

“And then my dad said: ‘If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war,’” recalled Chris Edmonds, who estimates his father’s actions saved the lives of more than 200 Jewish-American soldiers.

Edmonds survived – although by the end of the war, with the food shortages in Germany, life in POW camps was better than concentration camps only by dint of the assurance that the Germans weren’t supposed to kill the inmates.

2 thoughts on “Greater Love Hath No Man

  1. I think I recall a similar scenario occurring in the Wouk’s “The Winds of War”. I wonder if the author heard this reported at the time and worked it into his story.

  2. My thought when I read that article a was that the Army needs a “trucknuts” medal for actions like that.

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