Jakob Künzler, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Jakob Künzler

Swiss pharmacist and author, witness to the Armenian Genocide

Date of Birth: 08-Mar-1871

Place of Birth: Hundwil, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Switzerland

Date of Death: 15-Jan-1949

Profession: surgeon, philanthropist

Nationality: Switzerland

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


Show Famous Birthdays Today, Switzerland

👉 Worldwide Celebrity Birthdays Today

About Jakob Künzler

  • Jakob Künzler (March 8, 1871 – January 15, 1949) was a Swiss who resided in an oriental mission in Urfa and who witnessed the Armenian Genocide.Born in Hundwil, Switzerland, he 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 was a Swiss pharmacist who had remained in Turkey 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: ...
  • two Turkish officials who appeared in Urfa.
  • The rumor was that they hurried out in order to drive forward the extermination of the Armenian people with all their might, and they had the sanction of the highest state authority for doing so.
  • They ordered on this basis, scarcely the moment they arrived in Urfa, the killing of all gathered prisoners.
  • 'Why should we feed them any longer?' they said. He died in Ghazir, Lebanon.
  • He was buried in the French Protestant Cemetery of Beirut in which still lies his graveyard.

Read more at Wikipedia

See Also