{"id":56480,"date":"2015-12-09T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T18:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=56480"},"modified":"2015-12-06T09:40:27","modified_gmt":"2015-12-06T15:40:27","slug":"greater-love-hath-no-man-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=56480","title":{"rendered":"Greater Love Hath No Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had not heard this story – of a group of 1,000-odd American POWs\u00a0who, at the behest of a quick-thinking master sergeant, all called themselves Jewish<\/a> to protect the Jewish GIs among them.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

At the time of Edmonds\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So when the German camp commander, speaking in English, ordered the Jews to identify themselves, Edmonds knew what was at stake.<\/p>\n

Turning to the rest of the POWs, he said: \u201cWe are not doing that, we are all falling out,\u201d recalled [MSGT Edmonds’ son] Chris Edmonds, who is currently in Israel participating in a seminar for Christian leaders at Yad Vashem\u2019s International School for Holocaust Studies.<\/p>\n

With all the camp\u2019s inmates defiantly standing in front of their barracks, the German commander turned to Edmonds and said: \u201cThey cannot all be Jews.\u201d To which Edmonds replied: \u201cWe are all Jews here.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then my dad said: \u2018If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you\u2019ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war,’\u201d recalled Chris Edmonds, who estimates his father\u2019s actions saved the lives of more than 200 Jewish-American soldiers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0supposed\u00a0<\/em>to kill the inmates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had not heard this story – of a group of 1,000-odd American POWs\u00a0who, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56481,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56480\/revisions\/56481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}