On This Day in History: January 28

"We are all Jews here"

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In times of horror, there are often acts of heroism. When others lose their humanity, some hold on to decency and compassion like a lifeline, even though it may cost them their own lives. Such is the case of Roddie Edmonds, an American and prisoner of war who refused to identify the Jews imprisoned with him during World War II. With a Nazi officer holding a gun to his head and demanding he single out Jewish POWs, Edmonds said, “We are all Jews here.”

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 28, 1945--

Edmonds enlisted early in 1941, several months before the U.S. was even at war. And by late December 1944 he was a master sergeant leading green troops into Germany right when the bad guys launched their massive counterattack called The Battle of the Bulge. They had no chance and were quickly overwhelmed and taken captive.

Edmonds was the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in the POW camp Stalag IX-A, and the German commandant told him that the next morning he was to order only the Jewish prisoners among them to go outside for the morning’s assembly. The war was nearing its end and the Germans knew they were going to lose, but these Nazi crapnapkins still wanted to murder as many Jews as they could before it was done.

Rather than comply, Edmonds decided to say eat shit, you semi-sentient Nazi latrine of a person. On the morning of January 28, 1945, Edmonds ordered all of the camp’s 1,275 prisoners to assembly. The commandant was pissed. Despite being threatened with immediate execution if he didn’t identify the Jewish soldiers, Edmonds would not relent. The commandant then threatened to execute everyone, and Edmonds told him dude, if you do that, you’re gonna be in major deep poo after the war. The commandant backed down in the face of Edmonds’s defiance.

There were about 200 Jewish prisoners in the camp whose lives Roddie Edmond saved that day, and he told no one.

He fought again in Korea, and lived an otherwise unassuming life, dying in 1985 at the age of 65. Many years later, his son Chris Edmonds began to dig into his father’s history. He discovered witness statements given to Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to victims of the Holocaust, telling of his father’s heroism. Through Chris’s efforts, in 2015 Roddie Edmonds was awarded Israel’s top honor for non-Jews who saved Jewish people from the Holocaust: Righteous Among the Nations. In 2016 President Obama lauded Edmonds in a speech in Israel.

 “I think he just had a good sense of right and wrong,” Chris Edmonds said of his father.

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