‘“We are all Jews here.”’
January 27, 1945. Stalag IX-A, Ziegenhain, Germany.
A German commandant put a pistol to the head of a 25-year-old American master sergeant and demanded the names of the Jewish prisoners.
Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds of Knoxville, Tennessee, had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944. By late January he was the senior NCO among about 1,275 American enlisted men. The night before, the Germans ordered only Jewish-American POWs to fall out at dawn. Anyone who refused would be shot.
Edmonds understood what “separate” could mean. He ordered every American to fall out. No exceptions.
Morning came. All 1,275 men stood in formation.
The commandant, Major Siegmann, saw the line and shouted that they could not all be Jews.
Edmonds looked at him and said five words: “We are all Jews here.”
Siegmann pressed the pistol to Edmonds’s forehead. Edmonds did not step back. He told the commandant that under the Geneva Convention a prisoner owed only name, rank, and serial number. Religion was not on the list. Then he added the warning that mattered in January 1945: if you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us—and when this war is over, you will stand trial for war crimes.
Siegmann lowered the pistol and walked away. Not one Jewish soldier was handed over. Witnesses later put the number saved at about 200 to 300.
Edmonds kept watch over his men until liberation on March 30, 1945. He went home to Tennessee, served again in Korea, and never told his wife or children what happened that morning. He died in 1985 with the story still in his diary.
Years later his son, Pastor Chris Edmonds, found the witnesses. Their accounts matched. In 2015 Yad Vashem named Roddie Edmonds Righteous Among the Nations—the only American serviceman so honored. On March 2, 2026, Chris accepted the Medal of Honor at the White House on his father’s behalf.
The Germans asked him to point out the Jews. He pointed at all 1,275 men, and at himself.
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