"Take the [Germans] out of the Union Army and we could whip the Yankees easily," Robert E. Lee allegedly remarked. The quote, likely apocryphal, captures an important fact. Immigrants born in Germanic lands were enormously overrepresented in the Union Army. By one estimate, 176,817 donned the army blue, half again as many as their share of the overall population would have predicted. Other reliable estimates range as high as 216,000. And adding in the descendants of earlier generations of German immigrants would more than triple that total. The Germans, one contemporary judged, understood "from the beginning, the aim and the end of the civil war, [and] they have embraced the cause of the Union and emancipation with an ardor and a passion."

If the German reenactors actually "model their characters in the reenactments after...German immigrant soldiers," as they explained to the reporter that they do, then those who wear gray have their work cut out for them. Less than 10 percent of the Germans immigrants in the United States, scarcely 70,000, dwelt in the entire territory controlled by the Confederacy at the outbreak of the war. Many fled north, with perhaps 2,000 joining the Union Army. Hundreds of those who remained petitioned the consuls of German states for protection from the draft. There were certainly some ardent secessionists, and even a few slaveholders, and between 3,500 and 7,000 Germans may have served in the Confederate Army. But of that number, many were conscripted, a large number deserted, and some mutinied. "The German minority of the South," one scholar concluded, "was all but insignificant politically, economically, and militarily during the American Civil War."

So why are Germans dressing in Confederate Gray?

The PRI story explains that "A lot of fantasies have built up around the Confederacy; thanks to the movie Gone with the Wind, it is a staple of German popular culture." Margaret Mitchell's novel was published in Germany in 1937; over the next four years it sold 276,900 copies there, becoming the most popular American product of the era. Reviewers hoped it would salvage the reputation of the institution of slavery, redeeming it from the calumnies of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and praised its portrayal of a "wonderful, strictly regulated life," with "patriarchal, well-defined relations between black and white."

The film reached Nazi Germany in 1940. "A great American achievement," Goebbels raved, "One must see it more than once." It was reportedly one of Hitler's two favorite films. A home video shows him teasing a supporter, "I know you would rather be watching Gone with the Wind."

In itself, this reveals rather less than it may seem: Gone with the Wind may have "glamorized the Old South and romanticized the Confederacy," as historian James McPherson contends, but it is also among the most popular novels and films ever released. If German reenactors ground their affection in that imagined past, they are hardly alone.