German Battalion
military unit
The "German Battalion" (also known as the "German Regiment" or 8th Maryland) was an infantry formation of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Authorized in May 1776 as an extra Continental regiment, the battalion recruited ethnic Germans from Maryland and Pennsylvania.
The Continental Congress appointed Nicholas Haussegger to command the battalion, which initially organized in the strength of eight companies. While the unit assembled at Philadelphia, a ninth company was added. It fought at Trenton in December 1776, where its men called out in German for the Hessians to lay down their arms.
A week later, the German Battalion was in action at Assunpink Creek where a number of its troops were captured, including Haussegger. The next day, the unit fought at Princeton. After Haussegger defected to the British, George Washington appointed the Prussian volunteer Henry Leonard d'Arendt to command the battalion. The battalion served with the 1st Virginia Brigade at Brandywine and Germantown in September and October 1777. The following June the German Battalion fought at Monmouth.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5551047. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1776 and 1777.
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This entry incorporates text from “German Battalion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.