How Roddie Edmonds Became a Righteous Among the Nations

Deceive yourself no longer that you are powerless in the face of evil.

Israel’s highest honor, Righteous Among the Nations, is bestowed upon non-Jews whose heroic acts saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. Among the more than 28,000 people who have been honored, including Oskar and Emilie Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and Irene Sendler, are five Americans. Americans had far fewer opportunities than Europeans.

In 2015, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds from the United States was recognized as one of the Righteous. In 2016, in an essay for the Foundation for Economic Education, I told his story.

When I wrote the essay, I could not have anticipated a world where Jew-hatred would be acceptable on both extreme ends of the political spectrum. It's difficult to comprehend the influence of illiberal forces in our educational institutions that seek to undermine Israel and Western civilization. The silence of many college students, faculty, and administrators implies compliance and surrender.

It's hard to fathom that heinous crimes committed by a terror group consumed by their own hatred would trigger the socially acceptable expression of Jew-hatred. Who would have imagined crowds in America chanting “Yahya Sinwar, you make us proud.”

As Bari Weiss wrote, when shortly after the October 7^th massacre “more than 30 student clubs at Harvard put out a letter holding Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the massacre” it seemed like a “sick prank.” Of course, it wasn’t, and Harvard students were not an aberration. Weiss wrote, “The enemies … of America’s founding impulse began to reveal themselves.”

Bari Weiss: A Year of Revelations

In Canada, “pro-Hamas thugs” recently “set up an impromptu street blockade in a Jewish neighbourhood in Ottawa, deciding who may enter and who may leave. Police stood aside, as they have done since October 7.”  This has been the norm for the past year.

On this first anniversary of the Oct 7th massacre, I remember those who perished, those still held hostage and those in Israel still under constant existential threat by considering Roddie Edmonds whose mindset enabled his righteous acts.

Let's take lessons from Roddie Edmonds whose moral fortitude inspires us. In the present day, we are witnessing the emergence of courageous individuals. We can always learn from living examples around us. I am certain the vast majority of Americans are horrified by the moral inversion in the West. The examples of Edmonds and others help us find our voice.

Since I wrote my essay about Edmonds's heroism, his son Pastor Chris Edmonds published a gripping book about his father called No Surrender. Chris Edmonds has dedicated his life to sharing his father's story of an ordinary man who found extraordinary courage by honoring the humanity in others.

In a ceremony at the Israeli embassy in 2016, attended by President Obama and others, Pastor Edmonds made these remarks:

Being named among the righteous is a fitting tribute to dad, a man who lived by a sincere Christian faith and an infectious love for everyone. We were very proud of him and were humbled that he joins a small minority of ordinary people who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold the goodness and dignity of humanity. In a defining moment, when evil demanded their conscience and even their very souls, they refused to join the masses, but instead bowed to no one, and chose what is right regardless of the risk…

I'm often asked why would your father do what he did. Dad would say “Son, what's all the fuss; I was just doing my job.” But I say Dad's life was guided by one eternal truth, that there is a God and that God is good. And God's love, though free, has one essential responsibility: we must be good to one another, or as Jesus proclaimed, we must love one another…

That's what Dad did, along with these others who are being honored tonight. They leave an enduring legacy, along with the tribe we call the righteous. Their actions were founded on God's love and the extraordinary idea that all men and women are created equal. Tonight, we celebrate them because they acted on that idea. And though we honor them with words, nothing honors them more than their actions. Our duty now is to take strength from their example and resolve to live as they did, laying down one's life for freedom and human dignity.

No matter your religious or spiritual beliefs, there is a universal lesson in Pastor Edmonds’ remarks: Courage does not arise from personal bravado powered by the noisy voice in our heads.

Most of us have not encountered such extreme challenges to our moral fiber. But we can be mindful of the fearfulness we experience in this present time, and we can contemplate if by our silence we are contributing to extreme circumstances in the future.

A version of my 2016 FEE essay follows.

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Imagine these terrible circumstances. It is 1945. Roddie Edmonds, a 26-year-old U.S. Army Master Sergeant, is being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. As the highest-ranking soldier among the 1292 American POWs in the camp, he is responsible for their well-being.

Edmonds had been in the camp for one month when the German commandant ordered all Jewish American soldiers to line up outside the barracks the next morning. What happened next?

Roddie Edmonds told his men: “We are not doing that, we are all falling out."

Senator Tom Cotton movingly sets the scene:

January 27th, 1945, a bitterly cold morning in Northwest Germany, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds prayed one last time for courage as he had through a cold sleepless night.

Sergeant Edmonds had held his troops together for more than a month of captivity, starvation rations, forced marches, and freezing cold; but today was different. The previous afternoon the camp's loudspeakers crackled with a chilling order: Tomorrow morning at roll call all Jewish Americans must assemble, only the Jews, no one else. All who disobey will be shot.

Sergeant Edmonds’s response was immediate: We're not doing that. He ordered his men: Every American falls out in the morning even the sick and infirm, and every soldier would say he's Jewish. Every single one. No one could disobey or misunderstand or the plan would fail. Roddie checked his men throughout the night ensuring they were ready and prayed with them.

At the lineup, an angry commandant approached Edmonds and exclaimed, “They cannot all be Jews.” Again Edmonds is ordered to identify the Jewish soldiers; there were 200 Jewish soldiers among the soldiers lining up that morning.

The German commandant told Edmonds to identify his Jewish soldiers. Edmonds replied, "We are all Jews here."

Enraged, the commandant pressed a Luger to Edmonds’ head and again demanded that the Jewish soldiers be identified.

With his own life on the line, Edmonds had the presence of mind to reply, “According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank, and serial number. If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us, and after the war you will be tried for war crimes.”

The commandment lowered his pistol and angrily walked away. Months later Edmonds and his men were liberated.

We want to think we would have reacted the way Roddie Edmonds did – clearly and decisively. Perhaps. Or perhaps, more likely, our decision-making would have been muddled with thoughts such as, They’re just asking the Jews to fall out for a census purpose. I’m sure the Germans wouldn’t dare harm an American soldier. I would love to save my Jewish soldiers, but I can’t risk the lives of my other men.

Who would have faulted Edmonds if, when faced with a gun to his head, he simply reasoned, I had no choice but to give in?

Many of us would have failed this extreme test. We would have perceived the situation as one of conflicting interests, saving Jews or surviving. Our thinking may have gone into overdrive, processing our next move. With a muddled mind, the clarity needed to meet the demands of the moment would have been absent.

Pastor Chris Edmonds shares the power of Edmonds’ leadership example:

When Dad got the orders and told his men that they were not giving up the Jewish soldiers, they could have said no. When the commandant pressed the gun against my father, some of the men could have pointed out the Jews. None of them did that. They all stood together.

They stood together because they had a great leader. Chris Edmonds adds that his father’s story “is a clarion call to love one another regardless of our choices or faith. He stood against oppression. He stood for decency. He stood for humanity. This thing we call life – it’s about all of us, not one of us.”

“Love one another.” “All of us.” Idealistic words, but what do they mean in practice? We are used to thinking of love as a personal relationship with another person. Yet, often that “love” seems dependent upon what the other person does for us.

In his book Students of Liberty, FEE founder Leonard Read writes, “The alternative to violence is love.” He continues:

Love, as here used, refers to the application of the kindly virtues in human relations such as tolerance, charity, good sportsmanship, the right of another to his views, integrity, the practice of not doing to others what you would not have them do to you, and other attributes which result in mutual trust, voluntary cooperation, and justice.

Edmonds cared about the well-being of another group of people without thought of his own well-being. Edmonds expressed a bigger love than personal love. We can call this Big Love.

Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius advised in his book Meditations:

Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other – for one thing follows another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance.

It is difficult for our human senses to imagine “all things” being “mutually woven together.” In a letter to a father struggling to cope with the death of his son, Einstein too saw past the separation that we experience through our senses:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and his feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison …

We only experience Big Love when we look past the illusion of separation. That day in 1945, Edmonds’ decision-making was not clouded by thoughts of separation or a choice of one or another. Was the commandant bluffing, or did the authority of Love somehow alter the commandant’s decision to act out the violence he threatened?  

In Students of Liberty, Read argued that we all see ourselves as loving; we believe others subvert the principle of Love:

It is not necessary to make the case for the principle of love. Most persons will contend that it is the principle we ought to practice, but that it is impractical. But try to find the individual who believes it impractical so far as he is concerned. He doesn’t exist. Each person thinks only that it is others who are incapable of decency.

Is it only others who are subverting love? Small opportunities to practice Love arise all around us.

Consider this everyday event: we are in a supermarket express checkout line with our 15 items. We begin to feel irritated seeing the person in front of us has more than 15 items. We may glare boorishly at the shopper; we might even share some of our self-righteous thoughts. No, we would not be committing violence, and our position may even be “correct.” But would we be contributing to a world where we see that “all things are mutually woven together?” Perhaps the shopper had an urgent need or was merely inattentive.

Self-righteousness is a bitter tonic. We may find that our momentary satisfaction in being “right” at the checkout line has negatively colored our day. Make no mistake, it is our thoughts and actions that cast a shadow on our day, not the actions of the other shopper.

When we get our items to our car, we may decide to not bring our cart to the shopping cart corral. Thoughts of justification may arise as we think the cart corral is too far away. After we drive off we may not give a second thought to the impact of our decision on others. Saving thirty seconds is more important to us than the possibility of damaging another person’s car if our cart rolls away.

Is not our mental irritation, our disregard for the property of others, proof that we believe in the separation that Aurelius and Einstein warned against? Do we really think we can express irritation at others and not feel tension in our own bodies? What we do to another we may be literally doing to ourselves. Being “mutually woven together” may be more true than we can imagine.

We blame the world for not yielding up the perfect set of circumstances. We comfort ourselves that the “shopper” and “cart corrals” are at fault, not our weakness of character. We tell ourselves that people like Roddie Edmonds are special and that the range of human choices is different for us than for them.

People like Edmonds will seem rare until more of us honor our mutual interdependence as we encounter the small things in life. Our self-serving behavior may kick in when faced with a big challenge because our muscles for practicing Big Love are flabby.

Judging ourselves is not called for if our Big Love muscles are flabby. Self-condemnation slows, not hastens, learning. Aurelius and Einstein offered a better way to change: practice seeing the “interdependence of all things.” Deceive yourself no longer that you are powerless in the face of evil.

Every human being is capable of acting out of great hatred. Every human being is capable of acting out of great love. Every human being has the responsibility to choose. Our future is determined by the choices we make today.