This article presents an overview of the early career of Dr. Marcel Junod in the ICRC and how his experiences in World War II led to his appointment as UNICEF's first representative in China. An earlier version of this article, "The Doctor from Neuchâtel," appeared in March 2021 as the first in a four-part series on UNICEF's early years in China.
Lake Success, New York 1947
In late 1947, as civil war raged across China, Maurice Pate, UNICEF's first Executive Director, faced a major challenge. He needed to establish an operation, but he had no representative and only a few temporary staff in China. UNRRA was collapsing and its departing personnel were clear in saying that "now is not the time to come to China." The huge UNRRA programme budget for China had been depleted through corruption and mismanagement, leaving UNICEF little cash and few supplies. Pate needed a representative who would put things in order, build a team and establish credibility on both sides of the war.
By chance a Swiss doctor who had worked for ICRC during WWII dropped by Pate's office in Lake Success to say hello. The two men knew each other from the period when Pate had headed POW operations for the American Red Cross and the Swiss doctor was heading POW matters for ICRC in Europe.
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| Dr. Marcel Junod |
Dr. Marcel Junod had recently arrived in the US on a prestigious scholarship from the Swiss American Foundation to continue his studies in thoracic surgery. He had settled his family with relatives north of New York City and was looking forward to the next stage of his studies.
Pate knew Junod's track record. He was famed for his work in Hiroshima where he had been the first foreign physician to arrive and report on the disaster. Moreover he had spent the previous decade stepping into the world's most chaotic conflict zones in Ethiopia, Spain, Germany and the countries occupied by Germany during the war.
Pate thought that in Junod he had found the solution to his China problems and immediately set about working to convince Junod to accept the post of representative in China. For Junod this meant giving up his studies and a prestigious scholarship. More importantly it meant leaving the young family from whom he had already spent too much time apart.
Maurice Pate was known to be a very persuasive man. Before long he had convinced Junod to accept the post. Marcel Junod was soon on his way to Shanghai, arriving there on February 5th 1948. It was one more difficult assignment for him in wartime following a string of such appointments.
Abyssinia / Ethiopia: 1935–1936
In October 1935, while directing a surgical clinic in France, Junod received an urgent call from a friend in Geneva: Italy had invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Would he join the ICRC delegation as a field physician?
Within weeks of his arrival, the chief ICRC delegate was forced to depart under pressure from Italian complaints, leaving Junod as the sole delegate in the country. In his field reports, Junod documented atrocities few other international observers saw: Italian aircraft deliberately targeting clearly marked Red Cross ambulances, and the widespread use of mustard gas on Ethiopian forces.
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| Visiting surviving personnel after the Italian bombing of the Swedish Red Cross Hospital |
His field notes from 1936 capture the carnage:
"Men were stretched out everywhere beneath the trees. There must have been thousands of them. As I came closer, my heart in my mouth, I could see horrible suppurating burns on their feet and on their emaciated limbs. Life was already leaving bodies burned with mustard gas. But who was to have pity? Who was to help them in their suffering? There were no doctors available and our ambulances had been destroyed." - Marcel Junod
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| With Emperor Haile Selassie - February 1936 |
When Italian forces captured Addis Ababa in May 1936, the war in Ethiopia ended, but conflict soon erupted elsewhere.
Spain: 1936–1939
In July 1936, civil war broke out in Spain. Junod was dispatched on what was intended to be a three-week mission to evaluate how the ICRC might intervene in a civil conflict—a category of warfare where the organization had little prior precedent.
What began as a quick investigation turned into a three-year assignment. Junod crossed repeatedly between Republican and Nationalist lines to negotiate prisoner exchanges and secure reprieves for individuals condemned to death. He established civilian tracing systems for hostages on both sides and created an innovative "red card" system that enabled civilians to exchange short messages across front lines—providing a thin thread of human connection in a war defined by deep mutual suspicion.
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| Sporty transport across the lines - on the road to Valencia |
It was exhausting, dangerous work that required relentless diplomacy with military commanders. It also brought a sobering realization: he could bear witness, negotiate, and occasionally mediate, but he could not alter the overarching trajectory of the war. This gap between need and capability would mark all his subsequent missions.
Germany and German-Occupied Territories: 1939–1945
In September 1939, the ICRC assigned Junod to Germany and its rapidly expanding occupied territories. His first task was to negotiate with German authorities an extension of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War to cover civilian internees, including citizens of 'enemy' nations. Agreement was reached, but it did not include so-called 'stateless' people. This meant that Jews and other minorities who had been stripped of their citizenship were excluded from the agreement. Given the situation of minorities in Germany at the time, this was probably as expected, but it left a tragic gap in international law.
In his 1939 visits to Jewish communities in Warsaw, he could promise little beyond relief supplies and message networks. A year later, when the Warsaw Ghetto was established, ICRC was powerless.
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| Visiting Allied POWs |
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| Visiting prisoners in Stalag VII |
Even in doing its core work, ICRC faced problems. It was able to visit Allied prisoners, but there were long delays in getting permission to visit Soviet prisoners. German military authorities pointed to the fact that the Soviets had not signed the 1929 Convention. When Junod and other ICRC staff did manage to visit camps holding Soviet prisoners, they found the conditions of life and the treatment by guards appalling. Again, the Germans pointed out that with regard to POWs the issue was reciprocal and they knew that Soviet treatment of German prisoners was as bad or worse.
In the end Junod could only count one real success from his time in Germany and the occupied areas. In June 1940, German authorities accused France of executing captured German paratroopers and threatened mass reprisal: shooting ten French POWs for every German killed. Junod negotiated a twelve-day stay of execution, traveled directly to Toulouse to verify that the German paratroopers were alive, and rushed his report back to Berlin. His intervention averted the mass killings and saved dozens of lives. It was a rare moment when his mandate and his leverage aligned perfectly. It was also an exception in a long period of containment and constraint.
Hiroshima: 1945
In late 1944, Dr. Marcel Junod resigned from the ICRC, exhausted after nearly ten years in field war zones. Relieved to be home in Switzerland, he had recently married, was expecting his first child, and planned to resume his studies in thoracic medicine.
Then the phone rang.
Max Huber, President of the ICRC, appealed to Junod for one final mission: Japan. The situation was urgent. The war in the Pacific was drawing to a close. The likelihood of a U.S. invasion followed by intense fighting was high. Japan had refused to sign the 1929 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, triggering fears that Allied prisoners might be executed in final acts of desperation as defeat loomed. Worse still, the ICRC had no regular delegate in Japan to monitor events, as Tokyo had blocked the entry of ICRC personnel for more than two years. However, a narrow window had just opened: in February 1945, Japan signaled it would provisionally observe the Geneva rules, even without actually signing the accord. They also agreed to the entry of ICRC personnel.
Junod and a colleague, Margherita Straehler, departed Geneva in June 1945. Their arduous journey took them through Cairo, Tehran, and Moscow, then across Siberia by rail. Straehler was an invaluable partner; she had worked in POW tracing for years and spoke fluent Japanese, having grown up in Yokohama. They finally reached Manchuria in early August where they had to wait for final approval from Tokyo to enter Japan. They used their time to visit a Japanese POW camp where they managed to meet with three senior British, American, and Dutch officers long feared dead.
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| Marcel Junod and Marguerite Straehler with Tokyo Office staff |
Final permission arrived, and on August 9, Junod and Straehler landed in Tokyo—on the same day that an atomic bomb hit Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the U.S. had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Arriving in Tokyo, they knew nothing about either bomb. The same was true in most of Japan and the world. The US and Japanese military kept the news of the two attacks tightly restricted. Yet just six days later, on August 15th, Emperor Hirohito would announce Japan's surrender.
While news of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was tightly controlled, nothing could stop the rumors of unprecedented destruction. Junod asked Fritz Bilfinger, a Swiss businessman who had lived for years in Tokyo, and Marcus Weidenmann from the Swiss legation in Tokyo to visit Hiroshima unofficially.
The telegram he received back was a shock:
"CONDITIONS APPALLING. CITY WIPED OUT EIGHTY PERCENT. ALL HOSPITALS DESTROYED OR SERIOUSLY DAMAGED. EFFECT OF BOMB MYSTERIOUSLY SERIOUS... ESTIMATE MORE THAN HUNDRED THOUSAND INJURED IN EMERGENCY HOSPITALS COMPLETELY LACKING DRESSINGS AND DRUGS."
A follow-up report revealed that 270 out of 298 local doctors were dead or severely injured, along with 1,654 out of 1,780 nurses.
Armed with these reports, Junod went to the newly arrived US military to demand help. The U.S. military agreed to mount an assessment team and allocate an initial 15 tons of medical supplies. They also agreed to send supplies to Nagasaki.
Meanwhile, Junod approached a radiation expert, Professor Masao Tsuzuki of Tokyo's Imperial University, who had assembled a team from the university and would work with Junod in the two devastated cities. Tsuzuki took a report from his files, a report he had made to the American Radiological Society in 1926, describing experiments he had carried out on rabbits exposed to intense radiation. Autopsies of the rabbits showed how heart, lungs, and kidney were suffused with blood from massive internal hemorrhages.
"Tomorrow when you go to Hiroshima you will see the upshot of my experiment... 80,000 dead and 100,000 wounded. The effects of the atomic bomb are almost exactly the same. The magnitude of the experiment is greater, far greater, but that's all." "Yesterday it was rabbits; today it's Japanese." - Professor Masao Tsuzuki
On September 8, 1945, Junod arrived in Hiroshima, the first foreign physician to arrive in the devastated city. He was accompanied by a three-person medical team from the Imperial University. They visited hospitals and emergency clinics to make assessments and distribute supplies. They found a city flattened, medical personnel decimated, and survivors dying in numbers that defied adequate medical response. At one emergency clinic set up in a partially demolished school, eighty patients lay crowded on bare floors, tended only by a few surviving nurses and schoolgirls. At the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital—its windows blown out and laboratories ruined—hundreds lay without medicine or basic resources, while 600 others had already died and been buried on the grounds.
The team set up emergency clinics on the edge of the city and recruited medical personnel from other areas of Japan.
Although the U.S. military continued providing relief supplies, General MacArthur imposed strict censorship over reporting on atomic damage and blocked Junod's reporting aside from his confidential reports to Geneva. All media reporting was similarly blocked. It took more than a year for the story to reach the public, marked when journalist John Hersey published his landmark account "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker on August 24, 1946.
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| Photo from Hersey's article "Hiroshima" - Caption reads, "A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. Survivors wonder why they lived when so many others died." |
The US military proposed giving Junod the Medal of Liberty in 1946, but only for his exceptional work in finding Allied POWs and getting supplies to them while they awaited release. In any case, ICRC's regulations prevented him from receiving honors from governments. In the year of his death, 1961, the government of Japan posthumously awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure for his humanitarian diplomacy, and in particular for negotiating the release of Koreans in Japan and Japanese fishermen detained in Korea.
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| Monument in Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park |
In 1979 the Hiroshima Medical Association, Japanese Red Cross, and Chamber of Commerce erected a permanent monument in the Hiroshima Peace Park to honor Junod's work. Hiroshima was the most destructive disaster Junod had ever seen, but it was not his first encounter with the destruction of war and the suffering of civilians. His decade with the ICRC had systematically tempered him for impossible assignments.
Paris: September 1946 to July 1947
After resigning for the second time from ICRC in the summer of 1946, Junod returned to his studies in thoracic surgery. Outside his studies and work, he found time to collect his thoughts in a book, Warrior without Weapons (le troisième combattant), which was later published with a foreword by Max Huber, the ICRC President.
In reflecting on his years in the field, Junod articulated what his work had meant:
"There are never more than two adversaries engaged in battle. But these adversaries are apt to find that suddenly in their midst is a third combatant—a warrior without weapons. He fights for everything which human combat spoils and destroys. He appears wherever a human being is left, under no matter what form, at the mercy of his enemy. His only aim is to prevent the victor, whoever he may be, from relentlessly persecuting the vanquished." - Marcel Junod, Warrior without Weapons
Junod's experiences in Hiroshima led him to push loudly for a ban on nuclear weapons. He drew a parallel to earlier conflicts, comparing the use of nuclear weapons with the use of poison gas during the First World War:
"After the war, the various nations, horrified by the effects of this poison, signed a convention banning the use of this gas forever in future armed conflicts. This commitment was upheld during the Second World War, to the credit of humanity." - Marcel Junod
This conviction—that nuclear weapons must be prohibited by international agreement as poison gas had been—would drive ICRC advocacy for decades. The effort bore fruit in 2017, when the United Nations organized a Conference on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, leading to a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. By January 2021, the Treaty had received the required 50 signatures and entered into force. Yet none of the nine nations currently possessing nuclear weapons have signed it.
Shanghai: February 1948
Junod's arrival in China marked the beginning of UNICEF's first frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to work on both sides of a civil war. He will also figure in an article on UNICEF's beginnings in Korea. To those stories I will return in subsequent articles or you click below for the earlier 2021 versions of the articles.
Other articles about Hiroshima that have appeared in News & Views
- Tokyo 2020 and Peace Orizuru - A Somewhat Complicated Tale
- Colorizing Photos of the Survivors of Hiroshima
- Nobel Peace Prize for Nihon Hidankyo
Afterward
Did you know that our colleague and member of XUNICEF, Toshi Niwa, is himself a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima? Here are the comments he sent us on the article "Colorizing Photos of the Survivors of Hiroshima":
"To be frank, I am not sure whether the proposed colorization of black and white photos would add any value. I don't believe it a good project. I believe they should remain black and white. I recently saw the movie "Oppenheimer". It reminded me of many things, including the periodic medical checks at the ABCC I had experienced about Atomic bomb's possible effects on human bodies, interesting invitations from a group of nuclear scientists in Oakridge, Tennessee, who had expressed remorse about the development of the bombs, to my mother in 1950s and to me in mid-1960s when I was studying in the states, as well as my most recent visit to the peace museum in Hiroshima with my family one and a half months ago. I really believe it absolutely inexcusable to drop the second bomb in Nagasaki!
First of all, by all means, please share my reaction to members of XUNICEF about Miss Anju Niwata's project. It is a perspective of an a-bomb survivor. I just turned 6 years old on the day before August 6, 1945. I witnessed the suffering of hundreds of victims who happened to pass in front of our house in search for (non existent) medical attention, and subsequent massive cremation of those victims' bodies in a nearby field. I also witnessed with my own eyes the complete destruction of the city as I and my parents, unwisely, walked across the city, including through the bomb epicenter, to reach the Hiroshima train station, only two days after the bombing, to evacuate to our relative's home in a country side. My memories vividly got back to me when I accompanied my children and grandchildren to my native city of Hiroshima one month ago." - Toshi Niwa, August 20, 2023
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