The community core of Heidesheim itself lies some 2 km from the Rhine's banks, in a location safe from floodwaters at the foot of the Rhenish Hesse hill country.

Clockwise from the north, these are Eltville am Rhein (on the Rhine's right, or north, bank), Budenheim, Mainz’s outlying centres of Gonsenheim and Finthen, the Verbandsgemeinde of Nieder-Olm, the Verbandsgemeinde of Gau-Algesheim and the town of Ingelheim Many finds from prehistory and early historical times confirm that Heidesheim am Rhein's municipal area was settled as early as the New Stone Age (5500 to 2200 BC).

[1] In Roman times, north of today's community core, stood an extensive villa rustica, which was forsaken after the Germanic invasions in the early 5th century.

[2] The place had its first documentary mention as Heisinisheim or Hasinisheim in donations to the Lorsch Abbey, the earliest of which purports to date from 762, although in actuality it can only be traced back to some time between September in one of the years between 765 and 768.

While the Lords of Winternheim began work on Burg Windeck in the earlier half of the 12th century, the actual settlement around Saint George's Chapel apparently remained unfortified, or at least not amply so: when Archbishop Conrad of Wittelsbach was getting himself ready in 1200 to build Mainz's city wall up again after it had been razed on Emperor Friedrich I's orders in 1163, he obliged many villages in the outlying countryside to build their own respective sections.

The Heidesheim dwellers had to contribute, arm and maintain five merlons, for which they enjoyed protection, defence, market rights and free buying and selling in the city.

Both pledged henceforth to protect and defend the convent with all its holdings and rights – particularly the remaining two thirds of the court at Heidesheim[12] Der Mainzer und Magdeburger Erzbischof Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg bestätigte die Verfügung seines Vorgängers am 22.

The Sankt Georgskapelle (Saint George's Chapel) – in Heidesheim's north between the railway line and the Autobahn from Mainz to Koblenz – is “built in the fully preserved space of a Roman villa rustica …of which today still…two walls going up under the roof, in parts with original painting on the jointing outside and wall plaster inside, are preserved.”[17] The chapel's roughly 1,500-year building history has led to its beginnings being uncovered only bit by bit: Long were those sought – not least of all because of Bishop Sidonius's patronage – in Frankish times.

After the Thirty Years' War, Saint George's Chapel was held by Imperial Baron Philipp Erwein von Schönborn (d. 1668), who moved his family's landholdings from the Taunus to the Middle Rhine and the Main.

[28] And in 1934, Ernst Krebs wrote:“Thus now still stands Saint George’s sanctuary so lonely and forlorn there below as it did hundreds of years ago, and if one enters the church’s humble interior, one feels in this room as if sent back to a vanished time and only a train abruptly roaring by destroys the illusion and recalls the gap that divides the beginnings of the old place of worship from the present.

[29] Only in the third edition published in 1972 does one find an appraisal:“Alone in the field northern Heidesheim, near the former Mainz-Bingen Roman road: hall structure with plain enclosed quire and profiled triumphal arch pillars, probably 10th century (cf.

In the coming years, the Association will be undertaking digs in the area around the chapel and thereby promoting the scientific opening of the Roman villa rustica and the Frankish settlement bound up with it.

[31] The arbitrary ruling from 1209, on the other hand, mentions “lands and buildings” that his like-named son, Herdegen II, “has taken away from the Brothers of Eberbach in Heidesheim and upon which he has built his house’s wall and moat”.

[36] In so doing he refers to a document by which the brothers Philipp, Friedrich and Heinrich of Leien ceded for themselves and their heirs all rights at the Sandhof to Eberbach Monastery, which for its part forwent all levies that it had imposed on them and their father.

In the description of the Parish of Heidesheim drawn up sometime between 1667 and 1677 in Johann Sebastian Severus's Dioecesis Moguntina, it says:“On the edge of the village towards the Rhine one beholds farther away the castle house at the Wintereck which in the year 1626 Samuel Beck, chief cellarmaster at Mainz, acquired for himself and his family along with the forest, meadows, fields and cereal tributes for 800 Gulden and today has outfitted with an appealing building and fruit trees.

At the same time the main building housed a mill that with surrounding barns and stables formed an economic hub of extensive lands and of rich revenues, which Heinrich von Stockheim acquired in Heidesheim beginning in 1565.

The archives of the Princes of the Leyen are yielding as little about the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as about the time before this, and as for the decades that followed, no information is forthcoming about the Castle Mill.

The prices that Michael Schön and Karl Schmidt paid for the Castle Mill and for which they sold it bespeak their use of the property at the end of the First World War in the run on tangible assets or for speculation.

In 1934, Nikolaus Haupt reported in the municipality's newssheet about the renovation:“It was carried out from the mighty cellar vaults with the foundation, which here and there is more than two metres thick, up to the loft and it was worked in a radical way.

The works are an honorific attestation for former applied arts student and now master joiner Peter Schlitz’s mastery and achievement here.“In the left wing beside the main building’s entrance is found the former Castle Chapel, a rectangular room with two dainty cross vaults resting in the middle on a column.

Wonderful master paintings, much genuine carpets and much more complete the whole image of this property, whose uniqueness and cultural-historical worth is marked by the fact that the castle has been placed under conservation…”It was not enough that Max and Sofie and Johanna Holländer supplied work to Heidesheim craftsmen in economically hard times; they had to further prove themselves worthy, and this they did lavishly: Max Holländer – if not wholly selflessly – had the Grabenstraße (road) paved at his own expense, on which his chauffeur drove him to Wiesbaden each morning and back in the evening.

Older fellow citizens remember today: “a good-hearted woman!” The impositions against the couple as Jews that had been happening since 1933 grew even worse: After the Second World War, Johanna Holländer reported that already in May 1933, the Bingen Gestapo were extorting money from her husband and her.

Obviously the municipality knew that it had started nothing right with its long yearned-for property, the more so as the Bingen district office brought the donation into doubt, since it was against Nazi principles – if such things could be said to exist – to accept gifts from Jews.

Only in 1940 were the ownership relationships clarified, when the Municipality of Heidesheim paid 3,930 Reichsmark into “emigrant” Max Holländer's frozen account, thus changing the apparent donation into a sale.

An increase in property and business tax to 200 or 300 percent of the average state rates therefore cannot be avoided.” And then came the late confession:“Perhaps those who are also responsible will recognize the injustice in which they – perhaps unwittingly – have been complicit, and that they have brought the municipality untold harm.

Unfortunately, the main culprit cannot be held liable for compensation, since he owns nothing.”The rest of the story can be told quickly: Whether Johanna Holländer ever saw the Castle Mill again is questionable.

On this day the Castle Mill was entered in the Heidesheim register as belonging to her heirs: half went to each of the State League of Jewish Communities in Hesse (Landesverband der Jüdischen Gemeinde in Hessen) and Irgim Olèg Merkaz Europa in Tel Aviv.

The first Sunday in October is the time for the Harvest Festival (Erntedankfest) with a major parade, an exhibition of fruits and agricultural products and visits from partner towns in France and Germany.

Marching bands offer regular concerts, perform at local and regional festivities and provide extensive training for young people aspiring to master musical instruments.

Special interest clubs exist for dog owners, poultry, chess, the preservation of historical monuments (especially Saint George's Chapel), photography, and so on.