The Barracks at Winchester, Virginia and nearby Frederick, Maryland, and the surrounding countryside, became a detention center for thousands of British and German Revolutionary prisoners of war from 1776 to 1783.[1] Among those interred included the large contingent of German Auxiliary soldiers taken captive after the Battle of Yorktown in the fall of 1781. 

Collectively, these auxiliary troops are commonly referred to as Hessians, due to the majority of the soldiers coming  from Hesse-Kassel; however, many came from other Germanic principalities and city states. The Hessians are often described as mercenaries because their rulers rented out their service to the British monarch, but these men were not true soldiers of fortune. Their role in the Revolutionary War can be more accurately understood by referring to them as they referred to themselves � as the �Hilfstruppen�, or helping troops.

After the defeat at Yorktown, General Cornwallis had tried to negotiate the parole of his men, however General Washington emphatically rejected his plea and ordered the troops be surrendered, divided into two groups, and marched to prison camps in the north. Article V of the Articles of Capitulation stipulated they be sent to Virginia, Maryland or Pennsylvania; among these places, Winchester, Virginia and Frederick, Maryland were deemed perfectly suited for the containment of the newly captured prisoners of war. Their remote location in the mostly agricultural, largely German speaking �back country� was on the fringe of the frontier,[2] �where, according to German prisoner Lieutenant Johann Ernst Prechtel�s diary, �Indians and other wild people� could be found as close as fifty miles away.[3] 

The strategy of locating the captives near German speaking communities was meant to create their greater involvement in those communities and to covertly encourage desertions; the more desertions, the fewer prisoners to manage. The more men that could be hired out into the community, the less rations needed to be supplied. 

American Propaganda and Prisoner Management Strategies 

�From the very beginning, the deck had been heavily stacked against the Hessians through the Americans� concentrated tactics of using propaganda and �prisoner management� strategically devised to encourage them to defect. Immediately upon receiving accurate intelligence that the British were hiring Hessian soldiers for service in America, the Continental Congress appointed a

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