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.

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.

[citation needed] From 1915 to 1917 Künzler became an eyewitness to the Armenian genocide,[3] 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.

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.