- 1 day ago
A German commandant held a cocked pistol to the forehead of an unarmed American sergeant, yet lowered it within minutes. The answer lies in one tense morning at Stalag IX-A in Ziegenhain, where Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds ordered every American to fall out for roll call, turning an attempt to isolate Jewish prisoners into a formation of more than 1,200 men.
This military history story traces the chain of events from the Battle of the Bulge to Stalag IX-B, then back north to Ziegenhain, where Edmonds faced Major Siegmann and answered with five words that changed everything. The video also explains why the same order had worked weeks earlier at Bad Orb, how the men of the 106th Infantry Division resisted, and why later threats of war crimes carried real weight in early 1945.
It is a gripping World War II narration about POW survival, courage under pressure, the Geneva Convention, and the hidden power of solidarity in a prisoner-of-war camp. If you search for WW2 stories, military history, true wartime resistance, or historical storytelling about American prisoners in Germany, this episode fits that search.
Ideal for viewers and listeners who enjoy WW2 documentary-style narration, forgotten war stories, POW camp history, and powerful military history storytelling. It also suits anyone looking for World War 2 stories, historical narration, and long-form war history content about courage, resistance, and the lives of American soldiers behind enemy lines.
This military history story traces the chain of events from the Battle of the Bulge to Stalag IX-B, then back north to Ziegenhain, where Edmonds faced Major Siegmann and answered with five words that changed everything. The video also explains why the same order had worked weeks earlier at Bad Orb, how the men of the 106th Infantry Division resisted, and why later threats of war crimes carried real weight in early 1945.
It is a gripping World War II narration about POW survival, courage under pressure, the Geneva Convention, and the hidden power of solidarity in a prisoner-of-war camp. If you search for WW2 stories, military history, true wartime resistance, or historical storytelling about American prisoners in Germany, this episode fits that search.
Ideal for viewers and listeners who enjoy WW2 documentary-style narration, forgotten war stories, POW camp history, and powerful military history storytelling. It also suits anyone looking for World War 2 stories, historical narration, and long-form war history content about courage, resistance, and the lives of American soldiers behind enemy lines.
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LearningTranscript
00:00January 27, 1945. Stalag 9A. A prisoner of war camp outside the town of Ziegenheim in the hills
00:08of central Germany. Morning roll call. The night before, the Germans issued an order.
00:14Tomorrow morning, only the Jewish American prisoners will fall out for roll call.
00:19Any who hide will be shot. So the German officer who walks out of the camp office this morning
00:26expects to see a small group. 200 men, maybe fewer, standing apart in the cold. What he sees
00:32is every American in the compound. More than 1,200 sergeants and corporals in ranks in front of their
00:40barracks. At the front stands a master sergeant from Tennessee named Roddy Edmonds. To his right,
00:47a Jewish sergeant named Lester Tanner. To his left, a Jewish medic from New York City named Paul Stern.
00:54Paul Stern was born on January 27, 1924. He is 21 years old this morning. The order to step out
01:03and be separated from his own countrymen has landed on his birthday. The officer is a Major Siegman.
01:09He looks at the formation and understands at once what has been done to his order.
01:14He walks straight up to Edmonds, and the words come out in English, loud enough for the men nearby to
01:20hear them for the rest of their lives. They cannot all be Jews. Edmonds answers him. Five words.
01:29Remember that there were five, because we will come back to every one of them.
01:34And the Major draws his pistol, cocks it, and presses the muzzle against Roddy Edmonds' forehead,
01:40between his eyes.
01:43Stop the scene right there, and look at what each man is holding. The Major has a loaded pistol.
01:50He has guards in the towers and dogs at the wire. Behind him stands a government that,
01:56by this January, has murdered millions of Jews and has never once been made to answer for it.
02:03Edmonds has nothing. No weapon. No rank the Germans are bound to respect.
02:08A body that has been starving for five weeks. And yet, within minutes, that Major will lower the pistol,
02:16turn around, walk back to his office, and never again try to separate the Jewish prisoners in that camp.
02:23That is the question of this video. What stopped him? There is an easy answer.
02:29It is a sentence Edmonds said next, and it is true. But it is not enough.
02:36Because just a couple of weeks earlier, at another camp 60 miles to the south,
02:41almost the same order was given to almost the same men. There, it worked.
02:48Within weeks, 350 American soldiers were loaded onto a train, and some of them never came home.
02:55So whatever stopped that pistol at Ziegenhain, it was not only courage, and it was not only words.
03:03Something else was standing in that formation.
03:06We are going to take it apart, piece by piece.
03:09And one of those pieces is something neither man in that confrontation could possibly have known about.
03:14Before we go on, if you want to see how 1,200 American prisoners stared down a loaded pistol,
03:20and what it cost them, a like and a subscription help this channel keep telling their story.
03:27To understand how that formation came to exist, you have to go back five weeks,
03:32to a forested ridge on the border between Belgium and Germany.
03:35In December of 1944, the 106th Infantry Division was the newest division in the American line.
03:43Its men had reached the front only days before.
03:47They were put on a high wooded ridge called the Schnee Eiffel, in a sector everyone considered quiet.
03:53On December 16th, the German army came out of the fog in the offensive history calls the Battle of the
03:59Bulge.
04:00Within a day, two of the division's regiments, the 422nd and the 423rd, were surrounded.
04:08Edmunds was with the 422nd.
04:11In a small diary he would keep through his captivity, he wrote it plainly.
04:15We held out for two days, and the Germans paid dearly.
04:19Then, with no food, almost no ammunition, and no relief coming, the order came down.
04:25His next line is just as short.
04:28At the end of the 19th of December, to avoid mass slaughter, we surrendered.
04:33Thousands of Americans walked out of those woods with their hands up.
04:37It was one of the largest surrenders of American troops in Europe.
04:41Roderick Waring Edmunds grew up in South Knoxville.
04:44His mother died before he turned three, and an aunt raised him.
04:48Before the war, he was a stock clerk in a wallpaper store.
04:51In the Army, he became the communications chief in the 422nd's Headquarters Company,
04:56and back at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he had helped train the young replacements who filled the division.
05:03Some of them were Jewish.
05:05Lester Tanner was one of them.
05:07Years later, Tanner would say about the sergeant who trained him,
05:10he did not throw his rank around.
05:13The young men thought Edmunds was about ten years older than he really was.
05:17Those same young men were now prisoners.
05:20And notice this, because it is the hinge of everything that follows.
05:24The man who had trained them was still the senior soldier among them.
05:30Behind the wire, his stripes still meant something to them.
05:34Keep that diary in mind.
05:37A week before the roll call at Ziegenhain, Edmunds wrote a single line in it about the other camp,
05:42the one 60 miles south.
05:45Just a few words and a date.
05:48Jewish moved out.
05:50Thursday, 18 January, 45.
05:54He had already watched it happen once.
05:57What did he see there that made him decide it would never happen again?
06:01The walk into Germany began on the day of the surrender.
06:04For three days, the men of the 422nd marched east, 31 miles, with no food and no water.
06:13Men who fell behind were left to whatever the guards decided.
06:17Then came the boxcars.
06:2060, 70 men to a car, locked in, standing, for days.
06:27Sergeant Russell Hoff, from the regiment's machine gun section,
06:31remembered scraping snow off the sides of the car and eating it, because there was nothing else.
06:37On Christmas Eve, the train was caught in an Allied air raid.
06:41British bombers hit the rail yard, and the Americans inside the cars could do nothing but listen to the bombs
06:48coming down.
06:49First Lieutenant L. Martin Jones, of the 423rd, wrote about it afterward, in a single sentence.
06:57During this air raid, while locked in a boxcar and exposed to the falling bombs,
07:02I suffered the most helpless feeling.
07:06Hold on to that word.
07:08Helpless.
07:10Because in a few weeks, Roddy Edmonds would stand in front of a pistol and refuse to feel it.
07:17On Christmas Day, 1944, the train reached Stalag 9B, near the town of Bad Orb, in the Spessart hills east
07:25of Frankfurt.
07:27By the start of the new year, more than 4,000 American soldiers were behind its wire.
07:33The first thing the Germans did was sort them, by rank, and then by something else.
07:39Here is a detail most people never stop to think about.
07:43Every American soldier in that camp wore two metal tags around his neck.
07:48Name, serial number, blood type.
07:52And one more letter, stamped in by his own army, before he ever left home.
07:58P for Protestant.
08:00C for Catholic.
08:02H for Hebrew.
08:04The army that sent these men to war had stamped the answer into the metal they wore.
08:10And now the Germans were asking the question.
08:14Paul Stern, the medic, was one of the men who answered it.
08:18He had studied German in college, and he never let his guards find out.
08:23So he understood every word they said around him, and they never knew it.
08:27At Bad Orb, the Jewish prisoners were ordered to declare their religion, and the ones who did were moved into
08:33a separate barracks.
08:36Stern described them as 19 and 20 years old.
08:39Really, boys, he said.
08:42Inside, the mattresses were straw, crawling with lice.
08:46Six men shared one slice of bread and one small bowl of soup made from rotten potatoes and scraps.
08:53Stern said the soup was nearly impossible to eat, and then he added the line that tells you everything about
08:59that winter.
09:00We looked forward to eating it, because we were always starving.
09:05Lester Tanner had a name for that barracks.
09:07He called it a prison within the prison.
09:10In his diary, Edmonds recorded it in five words and a date.
09:21But the Germans were not finished at Bad Orb, and what happened next is the part I want you to
09:27study carefully.
09:28It is the closest thing in this story to a controlled experiment.
09:32The commandant assembled the prisoners and ordered every Jew to take one step forward.
09:38Then he gave them a deadline.
09:40Any Jew found in the barracks after 24 hours would be shot.
09:45And so would any man who tried to hide him.
09:48The Americans did resist.
09:50The prisoners had elected their own camp leader, a private first class named Hans Kasten, born in Hawaii to German
09:58-American parents.
10:00Kasten passed the word down through the barracks.
10:03Nobody was to admit to being Jewish.
10:06Some men threw their dog tags away.
10:09Some traded tags with friends who offered.
10:12Non-Jewish soldiers told their Jewish buddies they would stand with them.
10:16And still, when the deadline came, about 130 men stepped forward.
10:23Now think about that number for a moment.
10:25The camp had a leader who said no.
10:28It had friends who promised to stand together.
10:31It had men willing to trade the metal around their necks.
10:36Every element of resistance you could ask for was there.
10:39And the order worked anyway.
10:42Why?
10:43Look at how the order was built.
10:45It did not ask a group of men to decide anything together.
10:48It went to each man alone.
10:51A 20-year-old lying on a lice-infested mattress in the dark, doing the arithmetic.
10:57If I hide, they may shoot me.
10:59If I hide, they may shoot the friend who covered for me.
11:03If somebody else breaks and they find me anyway, then what?
11:07That is a different kind of weapon from a rifle.
11:10It does not need to find anyone.
11:12It makes them find themselves.
11:14We will never know what each of those 130 men was thinking.
11:18But we know Roddy Edmonds was in that camp, and that he saw it work.
11:23Now let me show you how thin the line was between the men who stayed at Bad Orb and the
11:28men who left.
11:29A few weeks before his capture, Paul Stern had been promoted to corporal after he saved three enlisted men and
11:36an officer on the battlefield.
11:38He never forgot what that promotion did for him, because on January 25th, the Germans pulled the non-commissioned officers
11:45out of Bad Orb.
11:481,292 sergeants and corporals were sent 60 miles north to Stalag 9A at Ziegenhain.
11:56Edmonds went with them.
11:57So did Lester Tanner.
11:59So did Stern.
12:01The privates stayed behind.
12:03Stern said it plainly, many years later.
12:06Those left behind were shipped to an underground factory, and many of them did not survive.
12:12Remember that underground factory.
12:14We will go there.
12:16When we do, you will understand exactly what was waiting on the other side of a single step forward.
12:22But first, the train north.
12:25Among those 1,200 sergeants were Jewish men the Germans had already sorted once, already moved into a separate barracks,
12:33already counted.
12:34The system had their names.
12:36It did not need to start over.
12:39They reached Ziegenhain on January 26th.
12:42That same day, the Germans made Roddy Edmonds the senior American non-commissioned officer in the camp.
12:48The man responsible for every American behind the wire.
12:51And that same evening, before most of the men had found a bunk, the order came again.
12:57Only the Jewish prisoners will fall out for roll call in the morning.
13:01Disobey, and you will be shot.
13:04The order had worked once already, on these same men, less than two weeks before.
13:09Edmonds had one night to answer a single question.
13:12How do you stop an order that reaches each man when he is alone?
13:15Stalag 9A was not a new camp.
13:18It had opened in September of 1939, in the first month of the war.
13:22And over five years, tens of thousands of prisoners from half of Europe had passed through it.
13:29French, Serbs, Soviets, British.
13:33The Americans were the last to arrive.
13:36They were packed into wooden barracks with stoves that could not keep out the January cold.
13:42On the evening of January 26th, in one of those barracks, Roddy Edmonds sat with the order.
13:49Look at it the way he had to look at it.
13:51It was the bad orb order, sharpened.
13:55At bad orb, the Jews had been told to step forward.
13:59Here, they were told to fall out alone, while every other American stayed inside.
14:06Same weapon, each man alone with his own arithmetic.
14:11Edmonds knew exactly where that arithmetic led.
14:14He had written the date in his diary.
14:17And the men around him had no illusions about where a separated Jew went in Germany.
14:23Lester Tanner said it directly when he testified decades later.
14:27The prisoners knew the Germans were murdering Jews.
14:30To be separated from the other Americans was to be put in great danger.
14:34So Edmonds weighed it.
14:36More than 200 Jewish Americans in his camp.
14:40If they were separated, he judged, they would most likely be persecuted and possibly killed.
14:47And then he made his decision.
14:49And here is what makes it remarkable.
14:51It was not a decision to hide anyone.
14:55He called in the senior sergeants under him and gave them an order to pass down through every barracks.
15:01In the morning, every American falls out for roll call.
15:05Everyone.
15:06Jew and Gentile.
15:08Nobody stays inside.
15:11Tanner remembered how Edmonds put it to the men that night.
15:14It would not happen.
15:16Not here.
15:18Now pause and think about what that order asked of the men who were not Jewish.
15:23A thousand men.
15:25Protestants and Catholics from Ohio and Pennsylvania and Tennessee
15:28who had nothing to fear from the German order.
15:32The order was not about them.
15:35All they had to do was stay in their bunks.
15:37Edmonds was telling them to walk out into the cold
15:40and stand in a formation the Germans had just forbidden
15:43under a threat of being shot.
15:45He was asking a thousand men to put themselves inside someone else's danger.
15:51They did it.
15:53All of them.
15:55And here is the part that is easy to miss.
15:58Edmonds had seen at Bad Orb that the order works on a man when he is alone.
16:03So he made sure nobody was alone.
16:06A man lying in the dark, wondering whether his buddy would break, has a hard choice.
16:12A man standing in a rank, with 1,200 others, in daylight, in front of the enemy,
16:18has no choice left to make.
16:21The decision has already been made, out loud, by all of them.
16:26He took 1,200 private choices and turned them into one public fact.
16:33The morning of January 27th came.
16:36The Americans filed out of the barracks and formed up.
16:40Edmonds stood at the front, with several of his senior sergeants beside him.
16:44Lester Tanner was one of them.
16:46Paul Stern, on his birthday, stood close enough to hear everything that followed.
16:51Major Siegmund came out to count the Jews.
16:53He found 1,200 men.
16:56The record says he was enraged.
16:59And you can see why.
17:01His order had been carried out to the letter.
17:04The prisoners had fallen out for roll call, exactly as told.
17:08He simply could no longer tell who was who.
17:12He went straight to the man at the front.
17:15They cannot all be Jews.
17:17And Roddy Edmonds, a Baptist from South Knoxville, who had grown up in church,
17:22looked at him and said the five words.
17:25We are all Jews here.
17:28I promised we would come back to every word, so let's do it now.
17:33We.
17:34Not they.
17:36Not those men.
17:38Edmonds put himself inside the group the Germans meant to remove.
17:43All.
17:44Not some.
17:46No exceptions.
17:48Which means no list.
17:50No gap the Germans could work into.
17:53Jews.
17:55The single word the regime had built its machinery to hunt down.
17:59A Christian sergeant had just claimed it for himself,
18:02and for a thousand other Christians standing behind him.
18:05Here.
18:07This place.
18:08This formation.
18:10Under his authority as the senior American in the camp.
18:13Five words.
18:15And the question the major had come to ask could no longer be answered.
18:19So the major changed the question.
18:22And this is the moment you saw at the very start.
18:25He drew his pistol, cocked it, and pressed it hard against Edmonds' forehead, between the eyes.
18:32According to Paul Stern, he said,
18:35You will order all Jews to step forward, or I will shoot you right now.
18:40Watch what has just happened here, because it is the hinge of the whole confrontation.
18:46The German order had been designed to isolate each Jewish prisoner, alone with his fear.
18:52Edmonds had undone that overnight.
18:55So now the major did the only thing left to him.
18:58He isolated the one man who could still give him the answer.
19:01Twelve hundred decisions had become one, and now that one decision rested with one man,
19:07with a muzzle pressed to his skull.
19:11Edmonds had taken all the fear in that camp and stood it in front of himself.
19:15If he gave the order, the Jews would step forward.
19:19If he refused, the major had promised to kill him in front of his men.
19:24He refused.
19:26And then he said one more thing.
19:28Paul Stern would describe that sentence to investigators seventy years later,
19:32and say he could still hear every word.
19:36But before you hear it, you need to know something Edmonds did not.
19:40That pistol was not the major's own idea.
19:44Since October, the men who ran Germany's prisoner-of-war camps had been answering to a new master.
19:50And at Bad Orb, that new master was already filling a quota.
19:55Three hundred and fifty men, for a place underground.
19:59Who decided where they would go, and what was waiting there?
20:03September 30th, 1944.
20:06A circular goes out from the Nazi Party Chancellery,
20:09signed by Martin Bormann, the man who controls access to Hitler.
20:13It passes on an order from the Führer himself.
20:17From October 1st, the custody of every prisoner of war in Germany,
20:21every camp, every guard, passes to the commander of the replacement army.
20:26That commander was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.
20:31Himmler handed the job to one of his senior SS generals, Gottlob Berger.
20:35The same order spelled out who would share the work.
20:39Prisoner labor was to be organized jointly with Oswald Pohl,
20:43the SS officer who ran the economic side of the concentration camps.
20:47Security was to be coordinated with the security police.
20:50And the Wehrmacht officers who commanded prisoners of war in each military district
20:56were placed under the senior SS officer of that region.
21:00Think about what that means for a German major running a camp of American prisoners in January 1945.
21:06The army uniform was still the same.
21:08The guards were still mostly older soldiers.
21:11But the chain above him now ran up into the same organization that ran Auschwitz.
21:17We do not have the piece of paper that sent the order to separate the Jews to Ziegenhain.
21:22No source I could find shows exactly who signed it.
21:26But we know who the camps answered to that winter.
21:28And we know what happened 60 miles south, where the same order succeeded.
21:34So let's go back to Bad Orb and follow the men who stepped forward.
21:39The Germans had asked the camp for a special detail of 350 men.
21:44The 130 Jews who had come forward were not enough to fill it.
21:49So the Germans went looking for the rest.
21:52Every remaining Jew they could identify.
21:54Men they called troublemakers, including Hans Kasten.
21:58The elected camp leader who had told the men not to admit anything.
22:03Men with names that sounded Jewish.
22:06Men who, in the words of the survivors, looked Jewish.
22:11And then men picked more or less at random, until the number was filled.
22:17By one count, only about 80 of the 350 were actually Jewish.
22:23That detail matters more than it seems.
22:26It tells you this was never really about faith.
22:29It was about a quota.
22:31A demand for labor came from above.
22:34And someone had to fill it.
22:37Once the first selection was accepted, any man in the camp could be made to fit it.
22:42On February 8th, 1945, the 350 were loaded onto a train at Bad Orb.
22:50Five days later, they arrived at Berga, a small town of about 7,000 people on the Elster River in
22:58eastern Germany.
23:00Berga was a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
23:04Here is what the underground factory Paul Stern spoke of actually looked like.
23:10Every morning, the Americans walked about two miles through the snow to a hillside.
23:17Seventeen shafts had been driven into it, about 100 feet apart.
23:21The Germans were building an underground armaments plant, out of reach of Allied bombers.
23:26The prisoners worked side by side with concentration camp inmates.
23:31Civilian foremen blasted the slate with dynamite,
23:33and the Americans were driven in to break up the rock before the dust had even settled.
23:39Some of the shafts went 150 feet into the mountain.
23:43The dust was so thick that a man could see only a few feet in front of him.
23:48They were fed bread and thin soup.
23:51They were beaten regularly.
23:54Daniel Steckler survived Berga.
23:57He described how the men kept each other alive at night.
24:01We maintained each other's welfare by sharing body heat.
24:05Winfield Rosenberg survived it too.
24:08Surviving was all you thought about, he said.
24:11And then, in one sentence, he described the whole place.
24:15I knew I'd go to heaven if I died, because I was already in hell.
24:20On March 14, 1945, Private Morton Goldstein was shot dead at Berga.
24:26The German sergeant in charge of the work details, Erwin Metz, would later be convicted of his killing.
24:33Now let me give you the number that measures this place.
24:37Berga had the highest death rate of any camp in Germany that held American prisoners.
24:42Of the 350 men who arrived, more than 70 were dead by the end of the war.
24:48Roughly one in five.
24:50Those men alone made up about 6% of all American prisoners who died in German hands in the entire
24:57war.
24:586% of every American prisoner death in German hands across the whole war,
25:04from one detail of 350 men, in about two months.
25:10Kasten survived only because he escaped during an air raid with two other prisoners.
25:14They were caught and sent to Buchenwald, where they stayed until the camp was liberated.
25:20Now bring all of this back to the frozen ground at Ziegenhain on the morning of January 27th.
25:26None of the men standing in that formation knew Berga existed.
25:30Edmunds did not know.
25:32The 200 Jewish sergeants behind him did not know.
25:36Not one of them could have named the place.
25:39But this is what the selection order was connected to.
25:42Not a separate barracks.
25:43Not a harder work detail.
25:46A system that by that winter ran up through the SS.
25:50That needed bodies for a mountain.
25:53And that had already shown at Bad Orb, it would fill its numbers one way or another.
25:58And that changes the question we started with.
26:01In the first minute of this video, we were watching one German officer decide whether to fire.
26:08Now you can see that he was not acting alone.
26:11He had an order from a system that did not stop for one sergeant.
26:16Something had to be strong enough to make a man in that position lower his weapon.
26:21So what was it?
26:23Edmunds' next sentence began with three words.
26:26The Geneva Convention.
26:28A treaty signed in 1929.
26:31A piece of paper.
26:33At that moment, more than 300,000 German soldiers sat in prison camps across America
26:39under that same piece of paper.
26:42Why would a German major with the SS above him still be afraid of it?
26:47Go back to the frozen ground at Ziegenhain.
26:49The pistol is still against Edmunds' forehead.
26:52The major has just told him to order the Jews forward or die.
26:57Edmunds does not argue about who is Jewish.
26:59He does not plead.
27:01He answers like a soldier quoting regulations.
27:05According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank, and serial number.
27:11On its face, that sounds like the weakest card in the deck.
27:14A sergeant with a gun at his head, quoting a treaty to the man holding it.
27:19But listen to what Edmunds is actually saying, because it is more precise than it sounds.
27:24The Geneva Convention of 1929, which Germany had signed, said a prisoner had to give his name and rank, or
27:31his serial number.
27:33Nothing else.
27:34It also said captors could treat prisoners differently only for a short list of reasons.
27:40Rank.
27:40Health.
27:41Health.
27:42Professional skill.
27:43Sex.
27:45Religion was not on the list.
27:47So Edmunds was not dodging the question.
27:49He was telling the major that, under a treaty Germany itself had signed, the question had no legal standing at
27:56all.
27:57But why would that matter to a man with the SS above him?
28:00To answer that, you have to leave Ziegenhain and cross the Atlantic.
28:06On January 1, 1945, the United States was holding 307,931 German prisoners of war in 425 camps across the
28:18country.
28:19Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Tennessee.
28:23Men captured in Tunisia, in Sicily, in Normandy.
28:27They were fed army rations, paid for their work, and treated under the same treaty Edmunds was quoting.
28:34Now hold that number up against the formation.
28:37For every American sergeant standing in the cold at Ziegenhain, about 250 German soldiers were sitting in an American camp.
28:46Every one of those Germans had a family at home.
28:49And their families knew that the way their sons were treated in Texas depended, in part, on the way American
28:55sons were treated in Hesse.
28:58And this was not theory.
28:59It was being bargained over in those very weeks.
29:03Through Swiss diplomats, Berlin and Washington were negotiating over the lives of 15 American prisoners,
29:09whom the Germans had condemned to death in answer to death sentences passed on Germans by American military courts.
29:16Both governments were watching each other's camps, counting, keeping score.
29:22Swiss inspectors and the Red Cross visited the camps.
29:25Their reports traveled back to both capitals.
29:29And every camp had a prisoner representative, a man the captors dealt with officially, whose name went into those reports.
29:37At Ziegenhain, that man was Roddy Edmunds.
29:41The Germans had given him the job themselves, the day before.
29:46So think about what the major would be doing if he pulled the trigger.
29:51He would not be killing an anonymous prisoner in a ditch.
29:54He would be executing the official representative of 1,200 American prisoners, in front of all 1,200 of them,
30:01for refusing to answer a question the treaty said he did not have to answer.
30:07Now, did the man at the very top of Germany actually care about that piece of paper in early 1945?
30:14We happen to know the answer.
30:17And it comes from just a few weeks after the roll call at Ziegenhain.
30:21In the middle of February 1945, right after the firebombing of Dresden,
30:27Hitler raised an idea at his headquarters.
30:30Germany should renounce the Geneva Convention.
30:34A naval officer on Admiral Donitz's staff later testified at Nuremberg about the purpose.
30:40It was to show German troops and the German people that captivity would no longer bring them any advantage.
30:47No more German soldiers surrendering in the West in the belief they would be fed and kept safe.
30:53Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the armed forces, was strongly against it.
30:59He went looking for support from Admiral Donitz.
31:01On February 20th, Donitz, Jodl, and Hitler's foreign ministry liaison, Ambassador Walter Hevel, met with that naval officer.
31:11They all agreed the step would be a mistake.
31:14The minutes record Donitz's view that the disadvantages outweighed the advantages.
31:20The convention was never renounced.
31:22Pause on that for a moment.
31:24In the last spring of the war, with the Reich collapsing, the men who had served Hitler most loyally looked
31:32at the Geneva Convention and decided Germany could not afford to throw it away.
31:37Not out of decency.
31:39Donitz's own suggestion in the minutes was that it would be better to take whatever measures were needed without announcing
31:45them and save face with the outside world.
31:48That tells you exactly what the treaty was to Nazi Germany.
31:51Not a moral rule.
31:53A shield the regime did not dare drop in public because too many of its own men were standing behind
31:59it.
32:00And that is the first thing that stood behind Roddy Edmonds that morning.
32:04Not a battalion.
32:05300,000 Germans in American camps.
32:08And a regime that would bend its own rules in secret, but could not be seen breaking the treaty in
32:14the open.
32:15But here is the problem, and I want you to sit with it.
32:18The same shield existed at Bad Orb.
32:22The same treaty.
32:23The same 300,000 Germans in America.
32:27And the train still left for Berga.
32:30The convention made the Germans want to hide what they did.
32:33It did not stop them from doing it.
32:36Which means the Geneva Convention cannot be the whole answer.
32:40If anything, it might have told the major to do the job more quietly.
32:45So Edmonds did something with the second half of his sentence.
32:48He took away the quiet.
32:51If you shoot me, he said, you will have to shoot all of us.
32:55And after the war, you will be tried for war crimes.
32:59It is January 1945.
33:01Not one German has yet faced an American court for killing an American prisoner.
33:06Why would that threat mean anything at all?
33:09Because 12 days earlier, and about 160 miles to the west,
33:13the United States Army had started taking photographs in a snowy field.
33:18January 14, 1945.
33:21A snow-covered field at a crossroads called Bonnier,
33:24just outside the Belgian town of Malmedy.
33:27For four weeks, this field had been behind German lines.
33:32On December 17, the first full day of the Ardennes Offensive,
33:37a column of the 1st SS Panzer Division had captured a convoy of American soldiers here.
33:43The prisoners were herded into the field,
33:45and the SS opened fire on them with machine guns.
33:48Now the Americans had the ground back.
33:51And the Army did something very deliberate.
33:54Before a single body was moved,
33:57the men from Graves Registration photographed every frozen corpse exactly where it lay.
34:0372 bodies were recovered from the field on January 14th and 15th.
34:09Then they were taken away for autopsies.
34:12The doctors recorded every wound.
34:15About 20 of the men had been shot in the head at close range,
34:19on top of the machine gun wounds.
34:21Some had skulls broken by blows from a rifle butt.
34:25None of this was for the newspapers.
34:27It was evidence.
34:29The Army was building a case,
34:31and it was building it while the war was still being fought.
34:35Now I want to be careful here.
34:37There was no evidence that Major Siegmund knew about those photographs.
34:42Edmunds had been a prisoner since December 19th.
34:45He almost certainly knew nothing about them either.
34:48But think about what that means for the threat Edmunds made.
34:52Standing in the cold at Ziegenhain,
34:54he told a German officer that he would be tried for war crimes after the war.
34:59To the Major, that may have sounded like a desperate man's bluff.
35:03It was not.
35:04Twelve days earlier,
35:07the United States Army had already started measuring bullet wounds
35:10in murdered American prisoners
35:12for a courtroom that did not yet exist.
35:15And it was not only the Army.
35:17More than a year earlier,
35:19in the autumn of 1943,
35:22Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin
35:23had publicly declared that German officers
35:26responsible for atrocities
35:27would be sent back to the places
35:29where they committed them to be judged.
35:31By January 1945,
35:34with Allied armies on the Rhine and the Oder,
35:37any German officer could see which way the war was going.
35:41Edmunds did not know about the photographs,
35:43but he knew what kind of country he came from,
35:46and he said the one thing that turned all of it
35:49into a personal problem for the man holding the pistol.
35:53Look again at the full sentence,
35:55because now every part of it does work.
35:58If you shoot me,
36:00you will have to shoot all of us.
36:02That is not a cry of loyalty.
36:05It is arithmetic,
36:07and it is aimed straight at the major.
36:09One shot leaves 1,200 American witnesses.
36:131,200 men who saw him do it,
36:16who know his name and his face,
36:18and whose names are on lists
36:20the Red Cross and the Swiss already have.
36:23The only way to make that one shot disappear
36:25is to kill all 1,200.
36:28And that cannot be done quietly
36:30in a camp full of other nations' prisoners
36:32in a country that, as we just saw,
36:35was still trying to save face with the outside world.
36:38Then the second half.
36:40After the war,
36:42you will be tried for war crimes.
36:44Lester Tanner remembered it even more bluntly.
36:46In his memory,
36:48Edmunds told the major,
36:49we know who you are.
36:51Now you can see what Edmunds had done
36:53to the major's position.
36:54His order came from above,
36:56but a court would not try his superiors
36:59for one dead American sergeant.
37:01It would try him.
37:02The system had handed him the job,
37:05and Edmunds had just shown him
37:06that he alone would carry the consequences.
37:09So put everything we have together
37:11and look at the choice
37:12the major actually faced that morning.
37:15Behind him,
37:16a system that wanted the Jews separated,
37:18but that would bend its rules only in secret.
37:20In front of him,
37:21a formation in which no single man
37:23could be frightened into stepping out.
37:26At the front of that formation,
37:28the only man who could give the order.
37:30And that man had refused,
37:32with a pistol at his head.
37:35If he fired,
37:37he would not get his Jews.
37:38He would get one dead sergeant,
37:411,200 witnesses,
37:42and his own name on a list.
37:45The pistol could no longer get him
37:47anything he wanted.
37:49It could only cost him.
37:51And he lowered it.
37:53He did not say a word
37:54that anyone recorded.
37:56He turned around
37:57and walked back to his office.
37:59The men broke ranks
38:01and went back into the barracks.
38:03And for the rest of the war,
38:05no one at Stalag 9A
38:06ever again tried to separate
38:08the Jewish Americans from the others.
38:11Paul Stern described it as
38:13brief but vivid.
38:15Over the decades that followed,
38:17he said,
38:17he thought about that moment
38:19hundreds of times.
38:20Somewhere in that formation,
38:22more than 200 Jewish Americans
38:24had just been given back their lives.
38:26And most of them
38:27never even got to see the face
38:30of the man who saved them.
38:32They were looking at the back of his head.
38:35So is that the answer
38:36to our question?
38:37A sentence,
38:39a formation,
38:40a treaty,
38:41and a future
38:42that one sergeant described
38:43before it arrived?
38:45It is most of it.
38:47But not all.
38:49Because the Germans at Ziegenhain
38:51had learned something
38:51about Roddy Edmonds that morning.
38:53And two months later,
38:55they would test him again.
38:57This time not with a pistol,
38:59but with trucks,
39:00attack dogs,
39:01and the whole camp watching.
39:04And this time,
39:05there would be no treaty clause
39:07to quote.
39:08What do you do
39:09when the enemy
39:10simply orders everyone
39:12to leave?
39:15By March of 1945,
39:17the war was coming to Ziegenhain.
39:19Edmonds knew it was coming,
39:20and he knew roughly how fast,
39:22because the prisoners
39:23had a stolen radio.
39:25Hidden from the guards,
39:27it gave him the news reports.
39:29American armies
39:30were across the Rhine.
39:32Patton's third army
39:33was driving northeast,
39:34into Hesse.
39:36And the Germans did
39:37what they were doing
39:38at camps all over the Reich
39:39that spring.
39:40They ordered the prisoners out.
39:43Everyone was to assemble
39:45and be moved east,
39:46deeper into Germany,
39:48away from the Americans.
39:49You already know
39:51what those marches meant.
39:52Remember the order
39:53from October,
39:54putting the camps
39:55under the SS?
39:57When Gottlob Berger
39:58was tried after the war,
40:00the charges included
40:01the forced marches
40:02of that last winter
40:03and spring,
40:04when hundreds of thousands
40:06of Allied prisoners
40:07were driven along the roads
40:08in terrible weather.
40:10At Berger,
40:11on April 4th,
40:13the surviving Americans
40:14would be marched out
40:15ahead of the advancing
40:16U.S. Army.
40:17Thirty-six more of them
40:18would die on that road
40:19before they were freed.
40:21That was what was waiting
40:22on the other side
40:23of the camp gate.
40:25Edmunds gave his men
40:26an order again.
40:27Notice how much it looks
40:28like the first one.
40:30The Americans were to form up
40:32in front of the barracks
40:33exactly as commanded.
40:34Then,
40:35when the transports pulled up,
40:37he would give the word
40:38and they were to break ranks
40:39and rush back inside.
40:41And there was more.
40:42According to Paul Stern,
40:44Edmunds told the men
40:45to make themselves
40:46look too sick to move,
40:48to eat dirt,
40:49to eat grass,
40:50anything that would slow
40:52the Germans down
40:53and confuse them.
40:54So the Americans formed up.
40:56The trucks arrived.
40:58Edmunds gave the word.
41:00Twelve hundred men
41:01broke and ran
41:02back into the barracks.
41:04The Germans drove them out again.
41:06They formed up again.
41:08And again they broke.
41:10For hours it went on.
41:12The Germans threatened
41:13to shoot them.
41:14They set attack dogs on them.
41:17And all around them
41:18they could watch
41:19the other prisoners going.
41:20The British,
41:21the French,
41:22and the Russians
41:22were loaded onto the trucks
41:24and taken away.
41:25The Americans
41:26kept running back.
41:28Now look at that standoff
41:29through the eyes
41:30of the German officer
41:31in charge.
41:32He had already learned
41:34in January
41:34what Edmunds would do.
41:36He had a camp
41:37full of men
41:38who would not move
41:39unless they were carried.
41:40He had Patton's army
41:41coming up the road.
41:42And every hour
41:44he spent arguing
41:45with twelve hundred
41:46American sergeants
41:47was an hour
41:48his own guards
41:49were not spending
41:50getting away.
41:52After several hours
41:53the commandant
41:54came out
41:54and announced it.
41:55The Americans
41:56had won.
41:57They could have the camp.
41:59The Germans were leaving
42:00and they took
42:01every non-American
42:03prisoner with them.
42:04About twenty-four hours later
42:06the American tanks arrived.
42:08On March 30, 1945
42:10the 6th Armored Division
42:12of the 3rd Army
42:13rolled into Stalag 9A.
42:16March 30 was Good Friday.
42:19The tankers found
42:20no German guards
42:21and almost no other prisoners.
42:23Just over twelve hundred
42:24American sergeants
42:25and corporals
42:26mostly from the 106th
42:28and 28th Infantry Divisions
42:30still standing
42:31on their own ground.
42:33In his diary
42:35Edmunds wrote
42:36one sentence about it.
42:37I know God was with us
42:39and he answered
42:40our prayers.
42:42Now let me put
42:43the two camps
42:44side by side
42:45one last time
42:46because the answer
42:47to our question
42:48lives in the gap
42:49between them.
42:51At Bad Orb
42:52the order went
42:53to each man
42:53alone.
42:55A hundred and thirty
42:56stepped forward.
42:58Three hundred and fifty
42:59went to Berga.
43:00More than seventy
43:02never came home.
43:04At Ziegenheim
43:05the same order
43:06met a single formation.
43:08No one
43:09stepped forward.
43:10No one
43:11was taken.
43:13And when the Germans
43:14ordered the whole camp
43:15onto the road
43:16at the end
43:16the same formation
43:18refused that too
43:19and it walked
43:20straight into the arms
43:22of the U.S. Army.
43:24So here is what
43:25stopped the commandant
43:27from shooting
43:27the American sergeant.
43:29It was not that
43:30he lost his nerve.
43:31It was that
43:32Roddy Edmunds
43:33had taken away
43:34everything
43:35a bullet could buy.
43:36The formation meant
43:37there were no Jews
43:39to pick out.
43:40His refusal meant
43:41there was no order
43:43to extract.
43:44The treaty meant
43:45the regime
43:46could not afford
43:47to be seen
43:47doing it.
43:49And the twelve hundred
43:50witnesses
43:51and the war crimes
43:52court Edmunds named
43:53meant that
43:54if it was done
43:55anyway
43:55one German major
43:57would pay for it
43:58with his own life.
44:00He was not
44:01stopped by mercy.
44:02He was stopped
44:03by an American sergeant
44:05who understood
44:06his position
44:06better than he did.
44:09And Edmunds' warning
44:10came true.
44:11Not for Major Siegmann.
44:13No record I could find
44:15says what became
44:16of him after the war.
44:17But for the men
44:18of Berga.
44:20After the war
44:21an American military court
44:22tried Erwin Metz
44:24the sergeant
44:25from the Berga mines
44:26and sentenced him
44:27to death
44:27for the killing
44:28of Private Morton Goldstein.
44:30The sentence
44:31was later commuted
44:32and he served
44:33about nine years.
44:36Willie Hack
44:36the commandant
44:37of the Berga camp
44:38was arrested
44:39in the Soviet zone
44:40and executed
44:41in Dresden
44:42in 1952.
44:44There was a trial
44:46after all
44:47just as Edmunds
44:48had said.
44:49And yet
44:50when he came home
44:51Edmunds told
44:52almost no one
44:53any of this.
44:54Not his wife
44:55not his sons.
44:57For forty years
44:59the story of that morning
45:00lived in two places
45:01in a little diary
45:03in a closet
45:04in Knoxville
45:04and in the memory
45:06of a Jewish lawyer
45:07in Manhattan
45:08who in 1980
45:09would do something
45:11for Richard Nixon
45:12because of it.
45:14How did a former
45:15president's real estate deal
45:17bring the story back?
45:18Roddy Edmunds
45:18came home
45:19in April of 1945.
45:22He was discharged
45:23that October
45:24at Camp Hood, Texas
45:25and he went back
45:26to Knoxville.
45:28Five years later
45:29the army called him
45:30back for Korea
45:30and he went.
45:32He married
45:33Mary Ann Watson
45:34in 1953
45:35and they raised
45:37two sons.
45:38He worked in sales
45:39and management
45:40at the Knoxville Journal.
45:41He coached baseball.
45:43He volunteered
45:44at nursing homes
45:45and homeless shelters.
45:46He almost never
45:48talked about the war.
45:49He died on August 8,
45:511985
45:52at 65 years old.
45:54As far as his family knew
45:56he had been a prisoner,
45:57he had survived
45:58and that was the whole of it.
46:01Lester Tanner
46:02never forgot.
46:04After the war
46:05he earned a law degree
46:06at Harvard
46:06and built a successful
46:08practice in New York.
46:09And in 1980
46:11he did something
46:12that made the papers.
46:14Richard Nixon,
46:15six years out
46:16of the White House,
46:17was trying to buy
46:17a home in Manhattan
46:18and the residence
46:20of an apartment building
46:21had turned him away.
46:22Tanner was
46:22a lifelong Democrat.
46:24He thought
46:24the rejection was wrong
46:26and he offered
46:26the Nixons
46:27his own townhouse.
46:28When people asked him why,
46:30he pointed back
46:31to the kindness
46:32of a master sergeant
46:33in a German prison camp.
46:35That is where the story
46:36waited,
46:37in a newspaper archive,
46:38for decades.
46:41Edmonds' son,
46:41Chris,
46:42grew up to be
46:43a Baptist pastor
46:44in Tennessee.
46:45After his father died,
46:46he had read
46:47the two little diaries
46:48from the camp,
46:49the names and addresses
46:50of fellow prisoners,
46:51the drawings.
46:53They told him
46:54his father had survived
46:55as a faithful Christian
46:56and a loyal soldier.
46:58They did not tell him
47:00what had happened
47:00on January 27th.
47:02Years later,
47:04his daughter got
47:04a school assignment
47:05to write a family history,
47:07and she chose
47:07her grandfather.
47:09Chris typed his father's name
47:11into a search engine.
47:12One of the first results
47:14was a New York Times article
47:15from 2008
47:16about Richard Nixon's
47:17search for a New York home.
47:19In it,
47:20an old lawyer
47:20named Lester Tanner
47:21credited Master Sergeant
47:23Roddy Edmonds
47:24with saving his life.
47:26In 2013,
47:28Chris went to New York
47:29and met him.
47:30Then he found other men
47:31who had stood
47:32in that formation.
47:33Paul Stern
47:34gave his own testimony.
47:36Seventy years had passed,
47:38he said,
47:38and he could still hear
47:39the words Edmonds spoke
47:41to the German camp commander.
47:43On February 10th, 2015,
47:46Yad Vashem,
47:46Israel's Holocaust memorial,
47:48recognized Roddy Edmonds
47:50as Righteous Among the Nations.
47:52He was the first
47:53American soldier
47:54ever to receive that honor.
47:57The medal was presented
47:58at the Israeli embassy
47:59in Washington
48:00on January 27th, 2016.
48:03The President of the United States
48:04was in the room.
48:06The date was not an accident.
48:08January 27th
48:10is International Holocaust
48:11Remembrance Day,
48:12because on that morning
48:14in 1945,
48:15Soviet troops reached
48:17the gates of Auschwitz.
48:18It was the same morning.
48:21While Auschwitz
48:21was being liberated
48:22in Poland,
48:23a sergeant from Tennessee
48:24was standing in the snow
48:25at Ziegenhain
48:26with a pistol
48:27against his forehead,
48:29refusing to hand over
48:30200 Jewish Americans.
48:32And it was Paul Stern's
48:3321st birthday.
48:35Lester Tanner died
48:37in January of 2023,
48:39at 99.
48:40At his funeral,
48:41in a Jewish chapel
48:43in Manhattan,
48:43the Baptist pastor
48:45from Tennessee
48:46stood up and read
48:47the 118th Psalm.
48:49This is the day
48:50the Lord has made.
48:52Let us rejoice
48:53and be glad in it.
48:55And he said,
48:56It was the greatest honor
48:58to know Lester.
49:00On March 2nd,
49:012026,
49:02at the White House,
49:03Chris Edmonds
49:04accepted the Medal of Honor
49:05on behalf of his father,
49:0781 years
49:08after that roll call.
49:10So let's go back
49:12one last time
49:13to the frozen ground
49:14at Ziegenhain,
49:15a major with a cocked pistol,
49:181,200 American sergeants
49:20in ranks behind one man,
49:22and that man,
49:24starving and unarmed,
49:26telling his enemy
49:27exactly what was coming.
49:29What stopped
49:29the German commandant
49:30from shooting
49:31the American sergeant?
49:33There was nothing left
49:34for the bullet to buy.
49:351,200 American soldiers
49:37had refused
49:38to be separated,
49:40and the one man
49:41who could have separated them
49:42had already decided
49:44he would rather die.
49:46Thank you for watching
49:47this story to the end.
49:48If it meant something to you,
49:50please give it a like.
49:51It helps YouTube
49:52show the stories
49:53of the American soldier
49:54to more people
49:55who still want to hear them.
49:57Subscribe and turn on the bell
49:58so you don't miss the next one.
50:00And tell me in the comments
50:02where you're watching from.
50:03If your father,
50:04grandfather,
50:05or uncle
50:06served in the Second World War,
50:07please write his name
50:09and the unit
50:09he served with.
50:11Every name you share
50:12keeps one more soldier
50:13from being forgotten.
50:15Just like Roddy Edmonds.