RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS—Here is America's only soldier to ever receive Israel’s highest honor conferred on non-Jews

RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS—Here is America's only soldier to ever receive Israel’s highest honor conferred on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. On this day 77 years ago, facing the threat of immediate execution, he and his men displayed an act of courage and character that exemplifies what it means to take a stand against evil.

US Army Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, 422nd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, the “Golden Lions”, was captured by German forces at the onset of the Battle of the Bulge. A native of Knoxville, TN, Edmonds was 25 years old. He had only been on the front line for five days when his unit was overrun.

Edmonds' captors marched him east where he was transferred to Stalag IX-A, a camp for enlisted personnel just east of Bonn, Germany. As the senior noncommissioned officer at the camp, Edmonds found himself responsible for 1,275 American POWs.

On January 27, 1945, the Camp Commandant ordered Edmonds to assemble all the Jewish-American soldiers so they could be separated from the other prisoners.

Furious, the German commandant walked quickly up to Edmonds, placed a pistol against Edmonds' forehead, and demanded that he identify the Jewish soldiers within the ranks.

Edmonds, a keen and dedicated Baptist, responded sternly, "We are all Jews here."

Edmonds then warned the commandant that if he wanted to shoot the Jews, he'd have to shoot everyone, and that if he harmed any of Edmonds' men, the commandant would be prosecuted for war crimes when Germany lost. Edmonds then recited that the Geneva Conventions required POWs to give only their name, rank, and serial number, not their religion.

Edmonds' actions are credited with saving 200 Jewish-American soldiers from being murdered. He survived 100 days of captivity, and returned home after the war, but kept the event at the POW camp to himself. He never told anyone. Edmonds later served in Korea.

It was only after Edmonds’ death in 1985 and the review of his diaries by his son that his story came to light. Jewish-American POWs, including Sonny Fox who after the war became an executive with NBC. He verified the story as did other POWs who were glad to share. The State of Israel declared Edmonds “Righteous Among the Nations” in 2015.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As we pause to remember the 6 million Jews and 11 million others murdered at the hand of their captors, we also commend all Allied Veterans who helped bring the tyranny of the Third Reich to an end. Master Sergeant Edmonds and the 1,275 American soldiers who stood defiantly with him on this day were a part of that story. We are the benefactors, and we pause to give our thanks. All The Way and more.

Photo, courtesy of Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem, The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous and The Rev. Chris Edmonds.

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Then the Germans sorted out the prisoners who "looked Jewish" and sent them to Berga/Buchenwald. An interesting read. Naturally the US Government kept it a secret. Don't want to make Nazis look bad.

Given Up For Dead: American GI's in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga Kindle Edition In December 1944, the Ardennes Forest on the German-Belgium border was considered a "quiet" zone where new American divisions, fresh from the States, came to get acclimated to "life at the front."
No one in Allied headquarters knew that the Ardennes had been personally selected by Hitler to be the soft point through which over 250,000 men and hundreds of Panzers would plunge in the Third Reich's last-gasp attempt to split the Americans and British armies and perhaps win a negotiated peace in the West.
When the Germans crashed through American lines during what became known as the "Battle of the Bulge," in December 1944, thousands of stunned American soldiers who had never before been in combat were taken prisoner. Most were sent to prisoner-of-war camps, where their treatment was dictated by the Geneva Convention and the rules of warfare. For an unfortunate few - mostly Jewish or other "ethnic" GIs - a different fate awaited them. Taken first to Stalag 9B at Bad Orb, Germany, 350 soldiers were singled out for "special treatment," segregated from their buddies, and transported by unheated railroad boxcars with no sanitary facilities on a week-long journey to Berga-an-der-Elster, a picturesque village 50 miles south of Leipzig.
Awaiting them at Berga was a sinister slave-labor camp bulging with 1,000 inmates. The incarceration at Berga is the only known instance of captured American soldiers being turned into slave laborers at a Nazi concentration camp. Given Up for Dead is the story of their survival. For over three months, the American soldiers worked under brutal, inhuman conditions, building tunnels in a mountainside for the German munitions industry.
The prisoners had no protective masks or clothing; were worked for 12 hours per shift with no food, water, or rest; were beaten regularly for the most minor infractions (or none at all); were fed only starvation rations; slept two to a bed in ghastly, lice-infested bunks; and were never allowed a bath or a change of clothing. Of the 350 GIs in the original contingent, 70 of them died within the first two months at Berga; the others struggled to survive in a living nightmare.
As the Allies' front lines moved inexorably closer to Berga, the Nazi guards forced the inmates to endure a death march as a way of keeping them from being liberated; many died along the route. Only the timely arrival of an American armored division at war's end saved them all from certain death.
Strangely, when the war was over, many of the Americans who had survived Berga were required to sign a "security certificate" which forbade them from ever disclosing the details of their imprisonment at Berga. Until recent years, what had happened to the American soldiers at Berga has been a closely guarded secret.

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