From Wilhelm von Steuben to Diane Kruger: Germans who've influenced the US

Her real name is Diane Heidkrüger and she was born in Germany in 1976. The film "Troy" with Orlando Bloom made her famous in 2004. She became a US citizen in 2013. Other influential Germans in the US film industry today include "Troy" director Wolfgang Petersen, and Roland Emmerich, who shot "Independence Day," the ultimate in patriotic blockbusters.

It was also thanks to the former Prussian officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben that the militarily inexperienced Colonist army was able to defeat the world power Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. With discipline, drill and order he made a powerful troop out of the guerrillas. He described his training methods in a book which became a standard military work.

The painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" is located at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It depicts a decisive moment in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), when the Colonists under General Washington, who had so far been unsuccessful, launched a counterattack on the British. It was painted by Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868), who emigrated to the US from Germany as a child.

His descendants founded the world-famous Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but this was still unfathomable to the butcher's son Johann Jakob Astor from Walldorf near Heidelberg when he moved to the US in 1784. He became America's first multimillionaire through fur trading and real estate sales — and was the inspiration for literary legends Ebenezer Scrooge and Scrooge McDuck.

With her husband Fritz, Mathilde Franziska Anneke fled Westphalia to Milwaukee, Wisconsin after the democratic revolution in the German states failed in 1848. She worked as a journalist, published a women's magazine and fought for women's suffrage and equal educational opportunities — and thus became one of the leading US feminists.

Löb Strauss, a young Jew from Buttenheim near Bamberg, emigrated to the USA in 1847 at the age of 18 with his mother and sisters. The Gold Rush drew him west, where he wanted to sell tent tarpaulins to gold prospectors — and saw that they needed robust trousers. Thus were "jeans" born — making Levi Strauss, as he was then called, and his business partner, Jacob Davis, rich.

Born in 1867 as the son of a Jewish cattle dealer in Laupheim, Germany, Karl Lämmle emigrated to the US at the age of 17. For 20 years he survived by doing odd jobs. In 1906 he visited a small movie theater — and it sparked an idea. He opened his own cinema, started a successful film distribution company and founded Universal Studios in 1915 — one of Hollywood's first big dream factories.

The 1930 movie "The Blue Angel" made Marlene Dietrich a world star, catapulting her to Hollywood with director Wilhelm von Sternburg, where she ended up staying. When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, she supported Jews who had fled and other exiled Germans. She also sang "Lili Marleen" to cheer up US troops — probably the most famous song of the Second World War.

Arrested and expatriated by the Nazis, Hannah Arendt fled to New York in 1941. The 35-year-old journalist and philosopher quickly learned English and became an American citizen in 1951. As a writer, she reported on the Eichmann trial and coined the much-discussed term "banality of evil." One of her goals in life was to explain how the Holocaust could occur.

Engineer Wernher von Braun constructed the V-2 rocket, which was built by forced laborers for the Nazis. After World War II, Americans had him come to the US. He was among over 1,000 German scientists who were never held accountable for their work for the Nazi regime. As the father of rocket technology, Wernher von Braun became a space travel idol in the US when NASA astronauts landed on the moon.

Born in Fürth, Franconia in 1923 as Heinz Alfred Kissinger, he emigrated to New York in 1938. During the Second World War he returned to Germany as a soldier — then as an American. After studying and teaching at Harvard, he advised politicians. The highlight of his career: Under President Nixon, the Nobel Peace Prize winner was US Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977.