Marcel Junod (1904-1961): the Red Cross doctor who personified "the spirit of the thing"

15-06-2011 Photo gallery

- © ICRC / hist-02893
16 June 1961 – 16 June 2011
Video clips :
Red Cross unit bombed in Ethiopia
Marcel Junod in Korea - 1959
Le rapatriement de Coréens du Japon en République démocratique populaire de Corée - 1960
On 16 June 1961, a heart attack cruelly and abruptly ended the life of Marcel Junod, a Swiss doctor who had been at the front of humanitarian action in Europe, Africa and the Far East from the mid-1930s to the end of the Second World War. He was the first foreign doctor to visit Hiroshima after the devastating nuclear attack by the United States on 6 August 1945.

Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on 14 May 1904, Marcel was the fifth of six children born to Pastor Richard Junod and his wife Jeanne. He was in his teens when his father died and his mother brought the children to live in her native city, Geneva. Thanks to financial support provided by a relative, Junod achieved his ambition to become a doctor and specialized in surgery. In 1935 the ICRC asked him to carry out a short mission in Ethiopia, where Italian forces were intervening against the Emperor Haile Selassie...
© ICRC / 03-01

03/1935. A few short weeks later he arrived in Ethiopia with an ICRC colleague, Sidney Brown - a "tall, fair-haired fellow" as Junod was later to write. They first met in Geneva where Junod was trying to read as much as possible in preparation for his mission; Brown warned him: "Books are all very well.... there are the official Red Cross texts of course, but, above all, there's the spirit of the thing..."
© ICRC / HIST-E-00087

While Italy said it had no need of humanitarian help from the ICRC, the delegates were welcomed with open arms by the Ethiopians, who lacked almost everything. Junod was tasked with coordinating a dozen ambulance units, some of them sent by national societies in Europe. To move around the vast country with its difficult terrain, Junod had the use of an aircraft - which was later destroyed in a bombing raid.
© ICRC / 04-01

1936. Both sides had signed up to the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of poison gas. However, Italy's use of liquid mustard gas helped to decimate Ethiopian forces and caused terrible suffering among the Emperor's barefoot warriors.
© ICRC / Smith, Hylander / HIST-01943

03/1937. After the Italian victory in Ethiopia, Junod was dispatched to Spain to coordinate the ICRC's operations during the civil war. It was a new challenge for the man and for the institution: unlike in international conflicts, there were no recognized laws to protect the victims of internal wars; civilians lived under siege, were deprived of life's necessities, taken hostage, separated from their families...
© ICRC / HIST-01847-06

1939. Junod and his colleagues negotiated with both sides in order to visit captives and persuaded them to allow prisoners to keep in touch with their families through Red Cross messages - more than five million were exchanged during the conflict.
© ICRC / HIST-02224-19A

11/1939. The outbreak of the Second World War saw Junod back in action throughout Europe, visiting prisoners of war held by both the Allied and Axis powers.
© ICRC / HIST-00883-24

11/1939. The 1929 Geneva Convention gave the ICRC a firm legal basis for visiting military prisoners of war - something that was entirely lacking for interned civilians.
© ICRC / HIST-02957-13

08/1940. Millions of messages were exchanged between prisoners and their families, through the ICRC's "clearing house".
© ICRC / HIST-02956-30A

After eight years of non-stop field work, Junod took a break. He spent some time at ICRC headquarters where he met Eugénie Perret, who worked for the ICRC's Central Tracing Agency; they married in December 1944. She was expecting their son when, in June 1945, Junod left on mission yet again - this time for the Far East, travelling to Japan via Cairo, Moscow, and then on the trans-Siberian railway.
© ICRC / 08-06

08/1945. The ICRC's main concern was for the Allied soldiers taken prisoner by Japan, many of whom had been held incommunicado for years. As the war in the Pacific reached its climax, even in the best of cases the logistical problems surrounding their release and repatriation were likely to be enormous. The Japanese POW administration was unable to provide a clear picture of the situation.
© ICRC / HIST-00261-09A

However, a new challenge was added to Junod's mission from the moment he arrived in Tokyo on 9 August: news began circulating of a devastating US attack on the city of Hiroshima, causing unimaginable and unprecedented destruction and loss of life. Shortly afterwards - following the Japanese surrender - a colleague, Fritz Bilfinger, was in the area and sent an apocalyptic report...
© ICRC / 13-03

08/1945. Bilfinger's dispatch – original, pdf format (67 kb), dramatized further by its obligatory telegraphic style, made chilling reading: "Conditions appalling - city wiped out eighty per cent - all hospitals destroyed or seriously damaged - inspected two emergency hospitals - conditions beyond description. Effects of bomb mysteriously serious - many victims apparently recovering suddenly suffer fatal relapse due to decomposition white bloodcells… now dying in great numbers..."
© All rights reserved / HIST-00261-40

Bilfinger's dispatch: original, pdf format (67 kb)

08/1945. Junod immediately contacted the American command and asked for emergency medical supplies, which he helped to distribute when he visited the stricken city a few days later - the first foreign doctor to set foot there after the catastrophe. He noted: "The city centre had been flattened like the palm of a hand. Nothing left. It was horrific."
© ICRC / HIST-00261-39

In April 1946 Junod returned home and was finally able to hold his son Benoît, born while he was in the Far East. The family settled at Lullier, in the countryside near Geneva; Junod the delegate returned to being Junod the doctor, later becoming the first head of the anaesthetics department at the cantonal hospital.
© ICRC / 18-03

In 1947 he wrote the story of his life as a delegate in a book called "Le Troisième Combattant" (Eng: Warrior Without Weapons) which has since been translated into a dozen languages and distributed worldwide.
© ICRC / coverpage

But Junod's international life was far from over: in 1948 he was appointed representative in China for the newly-created UN Children's Fund, a post he left the following year for health reasons. In 1952 he became a member of the ICRC Assembly, and in this capacity carried out further missions in various parts of the world.
© ICRC / 22-03

Widely respected for his humanitarian commitment, Marcel Junod died as he had lived: in action, while bringing a patient round from surgery on 16 June 1961. In 1979 a monument was put up in his memory in Hiroshima. It was after his experiences there that he had noted in his diary: "I have no doubt about it: the world is today confronted with a choice - to continue to exist, or to be annihilated if that bomb is used again…"
© ICRC

Related sections

History of the ICRC

More about Marcel Junod