Jakob Künzler

Jakob Künzler (March 8, 1871 – January 15, 1949) was a Swiss doctor who resided in an oriental mission in Urfa and who witnessed the Armenian genocide.

Life Born in Hundwil, Switzerland, Künzler worked in the canton Appenzell and made a living as a carpenter. Afterwards he was trained in Basel as an evangelist deacon (Krankenpfleger). In 1899, he traveled to Urfa in Turkey, where he found his own place to work. He continued to study medicine until he became an independent operating surgeon, and later in 1905 he married Elizabeth Bender, daughter of a Christian missionary and granddaughter of an Ethiopian princess.

From 1915 to 1917 Künzler became an eyewitness to the Armenian genocide, the subject of his 1921 book In the Land of Blood and Tears. Despite mortal danger, he helped provide, when he could, for thousands of Armenian orphans and resumed his hospital enterprise in Urfa.

He remained in Turkey, working as a pharmacist serving the sick and wounded, non-Muslims and Muslims alike, in a hospital in Urfa who documented accounts of massacres of various Armenian labor battalion companies.

In October 1922 he closed his hospital he worked in and moved his family to Ghazir, near Beirut, where later he opened a center for orphans. Later he established a settlement for Armenian widows in Beirut and a lung sanatorium in Azounieh.

Jakob Künzler observed in August 1915:

Künzler also witnessed the deportations of Kurds, of which he wrote:

He died on January 15, 1949 in Ghazir, Lebanon. He was buried and remains interred in the French Protestant Cemetery of Beirut.

Prizes and honors

1947 award by the University of Basel 1959 memorial in Hundwil 1971 earnings/service medals of the Lebanese government 1971 memorial in Hundwil and Walzenhausen, Switzerland

Literature

1929: In the Land of Blood and Tears 1959: Jakob, the Resource in the Service of Life