EICHENZELL, Germany — On Aug. 27, 1776, German soldiers hired by Great Britain took part in their first major battle of the American Revolution, playing a key diversionary role in the Battle of Long Island so that British troops could outflank the American forces.
The British victory resulted in their capture of New York City and some 2,000 Americans killed, injured, or captured.
Two and a half centuries later, hundreds of Germans gathered on a recent weekend in a small town near Frankfurt to reenact that moment of glory, at the annual Hessian military “Time Travel Festival.”
The importance of Germans in the American Revolution is still relatively underexplored on either side of the conflict. But each year for almost three decades, history buffs convene in August at Schloss Fasanerie, a former palace of the Hessian princes, to revive their forgotten history that lies between, as one of them put it, the Middle Ages and the 1930s.
This year, on the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, they also reflected on what American democracy has meant for their own country.
“It’s a reason to remember for Germans that there’s a history before 1933, because most of the people don’t have any idea of the 18th century,” said Karl-Matthias Gross, 63, a reenactor in the “Feldjäger” corps — “hunters” who served as the equivalent of special forces.
This year’s milestone anniversary also comes at a time when Germans are finding themselves forced to doubt the longstanding eight-decade-old American security umbrella and wondering whether values across the Atlantic are as closely shared as they’d long believed.
Post-medieval reenactments are rare in Germany, in part because of the dark legacy of the Nazi period, added Gross’s captain and one of the festival’s organizers, Andreas Clemens. Clemens was inspired to get involved in living history by travels in North America.
“There’s a multitude of facets in [German] history,” Clemens said. “It’s a history that connects, especially Hessians, with the States.”
The 30,000 “Hessian mercenaries,” as they’re commonly known, were really troops hired out by their own governments, not private sellswords. They came from not just Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Hanau but also from other small German states including Waldeck and Anhalt. For Germans outside those territories, their role in the American Revolutionary War is best known, if at all, from a 50-year-old book and TV miniseries.
At the festival, multiple forces in the war — German auxiliaries, American Patriots and Loyalists, and Redcoats — were portrayed almost exclusively by Germans. The festival was founded in 1997, with the help of American war reenactors serving in the US military in Germany, longtime participant Klaus Schäfer said.
Today the festival attracts an overwhelmingly local crowd. But Luci Spahr, a Franklin native who lives in Frankfurt, was one of the rare American attendees. She and her husband like to seek out “pockets of American history and culture” in Europe, she said.
“I missed the Fourth of July living here,” Spahr said. “I have to be honest, I missed that.”
In addition to the culminating Battle of Long Island each day of the weekend, festivities ranged from shooting and fencing lessons led by “barons” in fancy dress to an evening Baroque music festival in the historic palace. Vendors set up stands to sell books, antiques, and textiles, as well as some period cooking and, of course, multiple beer gardens.
The performers’ reasons for reenacting the Revolution varied. Many reflected on the particular importance of the American Revolution to their own country.
Matthias Kowalczyk, a 30-year-old from Kassel sporting period facial hair to portray a Hessian soldier, said that while he wasn’t “celebrating” the anniversary, exactly, he valued the war’s outcome.
“You invented democracy,” Kowalczyk said of the United States. “You had the counterpart in Europe, so much absolutism.”
Added comrade Tobias Breuer, 33: “You were the first to have something different, which apparently worked out in the end. So, from a political perspective, how it happened, is good for us.”
Many also participated out of a broad love for America, inspired in part by the tens of thousands of US troops who have been stationed in Germany continuously since World War II. One trio of attendees, part of the festival’s “civilian camp,” also reenact an American-occupied village in 1947.
“The best thing that could happen to Germany was to lose the war,” said Henrike Schwark, 64. “The Allies, they helped the people to get to their feet again, and they really gave people a good chance, so they could learn democracy.”
Others were drawn to America by Hollywood.
Manfred Schmitz, a retiree from Cologne, got into reenacting by way of a widespread German fascination with the American West. He went on to reenact World War II — but from the American side, even jumping out of a plane at Normandy.
“When you have love for America, you play an American soldier,” Schmitz said.
Multiple reenactors also mentioned the 2000 Mel Gibson movie “The Patriot” as an inspiration. A costume from it, a British red coat, even became the first reenacting uniform for Jens Hartmann, 50. He’s now visited the US dozens of times and recently reenacted the American Revolution in France for a 250th event at Versailles.
At the time of the Revolution, the Hessian troops stirred fear and outrage among colonists, thanks to propaganda that painted them as cold-blooded killers. Many of the Germans were hardened by fighting in prior conflicts like the Seven Years’ War — also for the British.
The Declaration of Independence complains of the British king “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny.”
Not long after the Battle of Long Island, the Hessians’ fearsome image was punctured. In the pivotal Battle of Trenton, Hessian troops were the main victims following George Washington’s famous Christmas Night crossing of the Delaware River, when the Continental Army surprised the Hessians and captured most of the garrison with little fighting.
Still, the Germans remained visible throughout the colonies, including in New England. For much of the war, Rhode Island was occupied by Hessian troops, and after British General John Burgoyne surrendered his army at Saratoga in 1777, thousands of Germans were held in Cambridge.
At the Siege of Yorktown, in Virginia, German soldiers fought on both sides — French forces who were fighting alongside the Americans had recruited them from the German Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken.
Following the war, thousands of German troops remained and settled in the US.
Clemens, the jäger captain reenactor, said the Hessians were typically shocked by Colonial wealth.
“They saw what the people had, the livestock, farmland, the houses, and they paid less tax than the Hessians themselves,” Clemens said. “What are they moaning about? There was disbelief.”
Many Germans who stayed were prisoners of war who escaped or deserted. Christopher DeLew, a US Army officer currently based in Germany, attended the last two Hessian “Time Travel” festivals after learning that he descends from Georg Zacharias Hatstatt, an Ansbach Jäger whose transport ship was captured in April 1777 before his unit even reached America.
Imprisoned in Massachusetts, Delew’s ancestor found work on a farm near Worcester, married the farmer’s daughter, and swore allegiance to the US.
“He went on to have 13 children,” DeLew said.
Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker@globe.com. Follow him @huffakingit.