Lester Tanner & Roddie Edmonds: WWII Veterans

[Por_sha911]

"We are all Jewish" (NOT PARF)

Tanner's story is entwined with the saga of Roddie Edmonds.

Edmonds was a master sergeant of the 106th Infantry Division, 422nd Infantry Regiment, in the United States Army during World War II.

He was the highest ranking officer at the ****'s Stalag IX, a prisoner of war camp, that captured nearly 1,300 American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. The soldiers, some of them barefoot, had been marched brutally for miles in snow and cold.

Tanner and many others suffered severed frostbite, which made his feet scaly even decades later.

in 2008 an article appeared in The New York Times about Lester Tanner — who in 1980 sold his townhouse to former President Richard Nixon, after Nixon had been rejected from an apartment building because residents there didn't want him living near them.

Tanner, a devoted Democrat, thought that was terrible. He reached out to the Nixons and said they could buy his place. In explaining why he, a Democrat, would be gracious to a disgraced Republican, Tanner explained that in World War II, a man named Roddie Edmonds stood up for him.

It became the defining moment in his life — and made him committed to doing the same.

In January 1945 in that POW camp, the **** commandant ordered Master Sergeant Edmonds to have all the Jewish soldiers fall out the next morning.

It meant that the ****s would separate them for extermination, Hitler's final solution.

Edmonds told the men the night before that they weren't going to do that.

The next morning, all of the nearly 1,300 American soldiers lined up. The 19-year-old Tanner stood at Edmonds' right, and another young Jewish soldier, Paul Stern, was on his left.

The commandant was incensed. He approached Edmonds and yelled, "They can't all be Jewish!"

Edmonds answered, "We are all Jewish."

The commandment cocked his pistol and put it to Edmonds' forehead, threatening to kill him then and there if he didn't have the Jewish soldiers fall out.

Edmonds refused. He said to the commandant that even if he were to kill him, "We know who you are, and you will be tried on war crimes."

The commandant relented, put his pistol back in the holster and walked away.

That day, Roddie Edmonds saved the lives of at least 200 Jewish soldiers.

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/memory-wwii-veteran-lester-tanner-we-all-jewish