Muslim Military Hospitals during the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

This article seeks to save the so-called ‘Muslim Military Hospitals’, health facilities reserved exclusively for Moroccan soldiers injured in the Spanish Civil War, from oblivion. The military and sociocultural causes that forced Francoist authorities to establish them throughout Spain during the conflict, as well as the rules and directives of their operation, their premises (cemeteries, mosques, cafés, etc.) and the local personnel assigned to the care of hospitalized soldiers will be explained. This paper constitutes an opportunity to analyze a singular and multifaceted aspect of the everyday life of hospitalized combatants and soldiers, the difficulties they faced when admitted as wounded or sick and their -sometimes, forceful- recovery and return to the war fronts. Yet, in spite of the closing of most of these hospitals at the end of the Civil War and the repatriation of the Moroccan soldiers, it will be demonstrated that a few of these facilities continued to operate, accepting wounded or dead soldiers, this time because of their participation in different acts of war: the war waged by the Francoist army against republican resistance in many regions and mountains in Spain, and in World War II as volunteer soldiers of the Blue Division marched to the Russian front. This body of work was developed mainly on the basis of the registers of the military services responsible for supervising and controlling the operation of these hospitals (High Commissariat in Tétouan, Office of Moroccan Affairs in Spain and Liaison Service of the General Headquarters of the Generalisimo). The present article aims to recover the history and geography of these unique memory sites, guardians of the memory, the suffering and the remains of many soldiers who lost their lives in a foreign war.