Medal of Honor Monday: Roderick “Roddie” Edmonds

On this day in 1945, a prisoner of war is liberated. But Roderick “Roddie” Edmonds wasn’t the only man freed that day. Because of his heroic actions, hundreds of other prisoners were liberated alongside him.

Do you remember this American hero, who received the Medal of Honor earlier this year?

Then-Master Sergeant Edmonds was among those serving with the 106th Infantry Division, 422nd Infantry Regiment at the Battle of the Bulge. Unfortunately, he was also among those captured on December 19, 1944.

Those Americans were force marched toward a railroad station, then locked into boxcars. They were starving and left without food and water as the boxcars rumbled toward a prison camp over the course of days. At one point, the train even took a hit from Allied fire, which left our boys feeling helpless.

The Americans were taken first to one camp, then to Stalag IX-A, arriving at the latter on January 26.

Edmonds was the senior non-commissioned officer of the 1,292 Americans in the camp that day. The German commandant turned to him, directing Edmonds to allow only Jewish POWs at the next morning’s roll call.

Edmonds knew what that meant. Those prisoners would be separated from the rest, possibly even executed. He couldn’t allow that, so he issued an unexpected order to his men: All American prisoners were to present themselves for roll call.

You can imagine the German commandant’s shock the next morning when he found all 1,292 American prisoners standing in formation. “You can’t all be Jews,” he demanded.

“We are all Jews here,” Edmonds responded, unflinching.

Irate, the German commandant held a gun to Edmonds’s head, demanding that he order only Jewish prisoners to step forward.

“By this time,” Edmonds’s son, Chris, recounted many years later, “dad had seen untold horrors. Brutal battle, a death march, bombing while imprisoned in a boxcar. Forty days of starvation, being beaten, stripped of his dignity, humiliated. . . . Yet he stood strong, fearless, resolute. My dad said quietly, ‘If you shoot me, you will have to kill all of us because we know who you are, and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war.’”

Dumbfounded, the German commandant simply lowered his gun and walked away. 

“With that one act of courage,” medic Paul Stern concludes, “Sergeant Edmonds saved my life, as well as all the Jewish prisoners.”

Later, as the Allies marched across Germany, the Germans attempted to evacuate prisoners to another camp. Edmonds led a “relentless pursuit of opposition and resistance,” his Medal citation explains, “forcing the Germans to abandon the camp leaving the 1,200 American prisoners behind.”

They were finally liberated by American forces on March 30, 1945. But for Edmonds, many would not have made it to that point.

Edmonds returned to the States and resumed normal life. He never spoke of his heroic act . . . but he had recorded a cryptic statement in a diary that his son Chris found after Edmonds’s passing in 1985.

“A lot of things I am not going to write, because they aren’t exactly nice to talk about,” Edmonds wrote. “I know God was with us and he answered our prayers. I learned men, even better than before. Some were good, some were bad, some were better and some were worse.”

The diary sparked Chris’s curiosity, and he set out to track down eyewitnesses. Edmonds’s bravery finally came to light.

Just a few weeks ago, Edmonds was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Chris received it on his behalf. “Today your father gets the honor he so courageously earned,” the President concluded.

Just another member of the Greatest Generation selflessly doing what had to be done.

Constitution4Kids.com

Primary Sources:

• DD-214 Veteran Story: Roderick Waring Edmonds (Knox County Public Library)

• Kim Guise, Roderick W. Edmonds Awarded Medal of Honor for WWII POW Camp Resistance (National World War II Museum; March 24, 2026)

• LIVE: Trump speaks on Iran as he awards Medal of Honor to US soldiers (Associated Press)

• Mark Richardson, President Trump awards Medal of Honor to three US Army soldiers, two of them posthumously (LiveNowFox; March 2, 2026)

• Master Sergeant Roderick W. Edmonds (U.S. Army)

• Matthew Shea, Trump posthumously honors WWII Sgt. Roddie Edmonds for saving American Jews (Jewish Insider; March, 2, 2026)

• Medal of Honor citation (Roderick Edmonds; WWII)

• Moskowitz Leads Bill to Honor WWII Veteran Roddie Edmonds with Congress’s Highest Civilian Honor (Press release; Feb. 7, 2025)

• Pastor Chris Edmonds on Roderick “Roddie” Edmond’s WWII Legacy, Saving Jewish-American Soldiers (AIPAC video)

• President Trump to award Medal of Honor (U.S. Army; Feb. 27, 2026)

• Rafael Medoff, America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History (2022)

• U.S. ARMY: Master Sergeant Roderick W. Edmond (Medal of Honor Heritage Center)