Recently we’ve been treated once again to the story of the ‘American Schindler’ Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds who in terms of the ‘Other Schindlers’ is rather unusual in that he actually engaged in his ‘rescue’ during the so-called ‘Holocaust’ not years before it which nearly all others did.
Edmonds has been in the news again recently because he was posthumously awarded the medal of honour for his ‘rescue of jews’ in 1945 by President Donald Trump on 2nd March 2026 (probably as a kind of PR stunt). (1)
So, it is apposite to look at Edmonds and his story with a critical eye.
Aron Heller writing for the ‘Times of Israel’ provides us the outline of the story when he writes that:
‘The Nazi soldiers made their orders very clear: Jewish American prisoners of war were to be separated from their fellow brothers in arms and sent to an uncertain fate.
But Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds would have none of that. As the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer held in the German POW camp, he ordered more than 1,000 Americans captives to step forward with him and brazenly pronounced: “We are all Jews here.”
He would not waver, even with a pistol to his head, and his captors eventually backed down.
Seventy years later, the Knoxville, Tennessee, native is being posthumously recognized with Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. He’s the first American serviceman to earn the honor.
“Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds seemed like an ordinary American soldier, but he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility and dedication to his fellow human beings,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and memorial. “The choices and actions of Master Sgt. Edmonds set an example for his fellow American soldiers as they stood united against the barbaric evil of the Nazis.”
‘It’s a story that remained untold for decades and one that his son, the Rev. Chris Edmonds, only discovered long after his father’s death in 1985.
Edmonds was captured with thousands of others in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 and spent 100 days in captivity. His son vaguely knew about his father’s past from a pair of diaries Edmonds kept in captivity that included the names and addresses of his men and some of his daily thoughts.
But it was only while scouring the Internet a few years ago that he began to unravel the true drama that had unfolded — oddly enough, when he read a newspaper article about Richard Nixon’s post-presidency search for a New York home. As it happened, Nixon purchased his exclusive upper East Side town house from Lester Tanner, a prominent New York lawyer who mentioned in passing how Edmonds had saved him and dozens of other Jews during the war.
That sparked a search for Tanner, who along with another Jewish POW, Paul Stern, told the younger Edmonds what they witnessed on Jan. 27, 1945, at the Stalag IXA POW camp near Ziegenhain, Germany.
The Wehrmacht had a strict anti-Jew policy and segregated Jewish POWs from non-Jews. On the eastern front, captured Jewish soldiers in the Russian army had been sent to extermination camps.
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 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.
Witnesses to the exchange said the German officer then withdrew. Stern, who currently lives in Reston, Virginia, told Yad Vashem that even 70 years later he can “still hear the words.”’ (2)
Now Heller’s narrative here contains all sorts of historical inaccuracies and misleading statements so let’s summarise what actually happened.
Edmonds was not the experienced veteran he is often made out to be in fact his first front-line served began on 11th December 1944 when he was transferred as a replacement to 106th Infantry Division in and around the Ardennes Forest having joined the US army on 17th March 1941 and spent nearly all the war as a communications chief stationed at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.
Five days after Edmonds began his behind-the-lines service with the 106th Infantry Division’s Headquarters on 16th December 1944: the German Ardennes Offensive (aka ‘The Battle of the Bulge’) began and overran Edmonds and his division with Edmonds surrendering with his men to the advancing German forces on 19th December 1944 having seen less than three days worth of actual combat.
Edmonds was then immediately sent to the German prisoner of war camp Stalag IX-B near the town of Bad Orb in the German state of Hesse where there was no problem whatsoever – Heller doesn’t even mention this as it runs counter to his whole spiel that ‘separation jewish from non-jewish prisoners-of-war was normal’ – but the problem occurs when he was moved to Stalag IX-B’s sister camp Stalag IX-A near the town of Ziegenhain in Hesse (now called Schwalmstadt).
Only now does the ‘Edmonds as Holocaust Rescuer’ narrative begin since the commander of Stalag IX-A ordered all jewish prisoners to ‘step forward’ during the daily morning roll call and Edmonds – being the highest ranked American prisoner in Stalag IX-A apparently – tells his men to refuse this order. I am rather doubtful of this which if my doubts are correct then it suggests the Edmonds narrative is likely made up or at least heavily embroidered).
However, the ‘US War Memorials’ charity’s account of what happened makes a lot more sense in so far as they narrate how:
‘The following day, the camp commandant ordered all of the American Jewish prisoners to line up in front of their barracks. Fearing that these prisoners were going to be executed, the highest-ranking American officer in the camp, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, ordered all of the American prisoners, Jewish or non-Jewish to line up outside the barracks. When the commandant demanded that Edmonds give up the names of the Jewish prisoners, he informed the commandant that we [the Americans] are all Jews here and repeated this statement even after the commandant put his pistol to Edmonds’ head and threatened to shoot him.’ (4)
This makes a lot more sense in that the commander of Stalag IX-A (Colonel Hermann Mangelsdorf) (5) approached Edmonds directly and asked for the names of any of those under his command who were jewish.
Edmonds then refuses because (as explained by Heller):
‘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.’ (6)
Essentially Edmonds believed Allied wartime atrocity propaganda and thus believed if he identified the jews to the Germans then they would be ‘killed because they were jewish’.
This is where history departs again from the regular Edmonds narrative because it turns out that Colonel Mangelsdorf had been requested to provide 350 prisoners for a work detail; it was Mangelsdorf who chose to select those 350 prisoners from American POWs even though there were a lot of other POWs to choose from. (7) Presumably Mangelsdorf selected American POWs for this work detail because the Americans were probably by far the healthiest and thus the physically strongest prisoners in Stalag IX-A.
Nor was such a work detail at Stalag IX-A unusual as the ‘US War Memorials’ website explains:
‘Stalag IX A held Belgian, British, French, Soviet, and Serbian prisoners of war (POWs) as well as Italian military prisoners. It was a large camp, with a population of more than 35,000 throughout most of the war and a maximum population of 53,408 prisoners in September 1944. However, most of the prisoners registered in the main camp did not live there but were instead deployed in the numerous work details (Arbeitskommandos) in the area surrounding the camp. Many of the prisoners were employed in the arms industry in Kassel, in violation of the Geneva Conventions prohibition on the use of prisoner labor for war-related work.’ (8)
While we can quibble about the legality of using POWs for war work and why modern commentators like to only whinge about the Germans doing it– the British for example extensively used German and Italian POWs as farm labourers (9) (to give you an idea circa 1 percent of the entire British agricultural labour force was made up of German POWs by 1945 which equates to 52% of all German POWs held in Britain in 1945 being utilized as forced labour on farms by the British government) – (10) but the truth is that such a work detail was not in and of itself unusual while it was Edmonds’ conduct towards such a work detail that was unusual.
This particular work detail however involved moving the POWs concerned from Stalag IX-A to the Berga an der Elster concentration camp – which was a sub-camp of Buchenwald – where they were put to work by the SS mining lignite (aka brown coal) that would then be transformed via the chemical process of hydrogenation into fuel for German vehicles to support the Axis war effort.
The point here is that despite all the shrieking about the German conduct ‘violating the Third Geneva Convention’; the truth is that according to the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 (often confused – deliberately or otherwise – with the updated Third Geneva Convention of 1949) the work detail using American POWs at Berga an der Elster was quite legal and despite all the complaints that POWs died during the work. (11) The Germans were never-the-less doing nothing that the Americans and British weren’t doing and while the Germans did arguably violate the spirit of the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 because they used Americans POWs as miners – which depending on the conditions could be counted as ‘dangerous work’ and as such violate article 32 of the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 – it is dishonest to present what the Germans were doing as the mythical ‘Extermination Through Labour’ policy of the Third Reich nor as ‘uniquely targeted against jews’ as Heller does.
In truth Heller’s claim in the ‘Times of Israel’ that:
‘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.’ (12)
Is complete and utter nonsense since as Yorai Linenberg notes:
‘While Soviet Jewish POWs were murdered, and French, Polish, and Yugoslavian Jewish POWs were mostly segregated from their non-Jewish comrades, American and British Jewish POWs were rarely segregated in POW camps.’ (13)
So, we can thus see that the idea that the Germans were going to ‘exterminate’ the jews who were American POWs in Stalag IX-A was simply a myth created in Edmonds’ head by wartime Allied atrocity propaganda and not something the Germans were actually doing.
Indeed, the recent narrative cited around Edmonds’ conduct at in Stalag IX-A is in-and-of-itself largely mythical and has been substantially re-written and edited as we have already documented above, but which can see most obvious in how the US Army’s official narrative of what happened shows.
To wit:
‘Instead of conceding, Edmonds warned the officer that executing him would lead to prosecution for war crimes after the war. The officer lowered his weapon and returned to his office without further attempts to segregate the Jewish prisoners from the larger group.’ (14)
This last statement that there were no ‘further attempts to segregate the Jewish prisoners from the larger group’ is complete nonsense.
Since as ‘The National World War II Museum’ explains:
‘Eventually, under duress, many Jews did self-identify and others were selected randomly, by name, appearance, or otherwise. Three hundred fifty American POWs were selected to be sent to the Berga slave labor camp upon suspicion of being Jewish.’ (15)
While Mitchell Bard – himself jewish and a significant figure in the US Israel Lobby as well as an author of a book on the subject of the German treatment of Americans POWs during World War II – writes that:
‘Approximately 130 Jews ultimately came forward. They were segregated and placed in a special barracks. Some 50 non-commissioned officers from the group were taken out of the camp, along with the non-Jewish NCOs.
The Germans had a quota of 350 for a special detail. All the remaining Jews were taken, along with prisoners considered troublemakers, those they thought were Jewish and others chosen at random.’ (16)
Put simply the Germans – contrary to the claim by US Army – did actually successfully get jews to volunteer for the work detail at Berga an der Elster and then because there were insufficient jews in Stalag IX-A – they were broadly underrepresented in the US Army in World War II despise loud claims to the contrary so this is not a surprise – the Germans simply picked anyone who ‘looked jewish’ – this is in line with the science of the day which equated phenotype with genotype in genetics – as well as other prisoners at random.
This then means that whole historical edifice on which Edmonds is considered the ‘American Schindler’ is a tissue of misrepresentations and lies as Edmonds saved no jews from anything as they volunteered anyway, they weren’t being taken to ‘be murdered’ at all and the entire reason Edmonds believed they were was because he had spent nearly all of World War II in Georgia and so was heavily propagandised by wartime Allied atrocity propaganda concerning the Germans ‘exterminating jews’.
So, in essence Edmonds has been posthumously awarded the medal of honour for – to be quite frank – being a gullible idiot who – as we can clearly see from the actual history – put his own fellow soldiers in harms way by trying to incite collective disobedience to a legal action by the German military authorities based on his uncritical belief of Allied wartime propaganda claims.
References
(1) https://burchett.house.gov/media/press-releases/master-sergeant-roddie-edmonds-posthumously-receives-medal-honor
(2) https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-honors-us-gi-who-told-the-nazis-we-are-all-jews/
(3) https://www.gedenkstaette-trutzhain.de/eng/
(4) https://uswarmemorials.org/html/monument_details.php?SiteID=3501&MemID=4883
(5) https://muse.jhu.edu/document/4714
(6) https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-honors-us-gi-who-told-the-nazis-we-are-all-jews/
(7) https://muse.jhu.edu/document/4714
(8) https://uswarmemorials.org/html/monument_details.php?SiteID=3501&MemID=4883
(9) Cf. Johann Custodis, 2012, ‘Employing the Enemy: The Contribution of German and Italian Prisoners of War to British Agriculture during and after the Second World War’, The Agricultural History Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 243-265
(10) Ibid., pp. 245-246
(11) On the provisions concerned see: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/geneva02.asp (Articles 27-34)
(12) https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-honors-us-gi-who-told-the-nazis-we-are-all-jews/
(13) Yorai Linenberg, 2023, ‘German Captors, Jewish POWs: Segregation of American and British Jewish POWs in German Captivity in the Second World War’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, p. 404
(14) https://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/edmonds/index.html
(15) https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/jewish-american-pows-europe
(16) https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/berga.html
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