1. Famous German Americans

2. John Jacob Bausch
Bausch & Lomb Incorporated, one of the oldest continuously operating companies in the U.S today. Bausch & Lomb traces its roots to 1853, when John Jacob Bausch, a German immigrant, set up a tiny optical goods shop in Rochester, New York.

3. Wernher Von Braun
( ) German-American engineer, known for his development of the liquid-fuel rocket.
The German-born engineer Wernher von Braun, born Mar. 23, 1912 in Wirsitz (now Wyrzysk, Poland), died June 23, 1977, was a driving force in the development of manned space flight and directed the development of the rockets that put humans on the Moon.

4. Albert Einstein
( ), German-born American physicist and Nobel laureate, best known as the creator of the special and general theories of relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of light. He is perhaps the most well- known scientist of the 20th century. Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and spent his youth in Munich, where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery. He did not talk until the age of three, but even as a youth he showed a brilliant curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts.

5. Dwight David Eisenhower
( ), American military leader, whose great popularity as Allied supreme commander during World War II secured him election as the 34th president of the U.S. ( ). Born in Denison, Tex., on Oct. 14, 1890, Eisenhower grew up on a small farm in Abilene, Kansas.

6. Henry Louis Gehrig
( ), American professional baseball player, born in New York City and educated at Columbia University. From 1924 until 1939, he played first base for the New York Yankees of the American League. Called the Iron Horse, he established a record for the number of consecutive games played by a professional baseball player, taking part in 2130 games in succession. His lifetime batting average was Gehrig was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939, and in 1940 he was appointed a commissioner on the New York State Parole Board.

7. Henry Alfred Kissinger
(1923- ), German-American scholar and Nobel laureate, statesman, secretary of state under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, May 23, He was brought to the U.S. by his parents in 1938, became a citizen five years later, and was educated at Harvard University. From 1943 to Kissinger served as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army.

8. Elvis Presley the King of Rock and Roll
Germany was gripped by "Elvis fever" as early as the Fifties, when the "King" went to Bad Nauheim (Hessen) to fulfill his military obligations. Little did his German fans know that they had another reason to love him he was, it turns out, a German.  According to Donald W. Presley and Edward C. Dunn, both distant relatives of the King, a direct link can be made from Elvis back to a certain Johann Valentin Pressler, a winegrower who emigrated to America in Pressler came from a village in southern Palatinate called Niederhochstadt. Niederhochstadt became Hochstadt sometime during the 250 years after Johann Pressler left it, but there are still many Presslers there, among them a winegrower like Johann Valentin.  Johann Valentin first settled in New York and later moved his family to the South. The name was Anglicized during the Civil War by a Pressler serving in the Confederate Army.

9. Joseph Pulitzer
( ), German-American, journalist, born in Makó, Hungary. Pulitzer immigrated to the U.S. in 1864 and served in the First New York Cavalry during the American Civil War. He became an American citizen in 1867, a reporter on a German daily, the Westliche Post, in Saint Louis, Mo., the same year, and managing editor and part owner of the newspaper in Two years later he left the paper. After receiving a law degree and working as a correspondent for the New York Sun, in 1878 he bought the St. Louis Evening Dispatch and Evening Post, combining them into the Post-Dispatch. In 1883 he acquired the New York World.

10. George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth
( ), American professional baseball player, born in Baltimore, Md., and educated at Saint Mary's Industrial School in that city. Ruth was one of the most phenomenally gifted and popular players in the history of baseball. He began his career in 1914 as a left-handed pitcher for the Baltimore team of the International League. Later in the same year he played for the Providence team of the International League and then became a member of the Boston Red Sox of the American League. He pitched for Boston until the 1919 season, when his unusual ability as a batter and fielder caused the Boston management to convert him into an outfielder. From 1920 to 1935 he played the outfield for the New York Yankees of the American League.

11. Arnold Schwarzenegger
(1947-). One of the world's best-known and most popular personalities, Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger, born July 30, 1947 in Graz, Austria, parlayed a championship bodybuilding career into even greater success as the hero of Hollywood action films that were among the highest grossing in movie history. After winning the Mr. Europe and Best-Built Man of Europe titles in and becoming Mr. Universe in 1967, Schwarzenegger went to the United States in 1968, where he won the Mr. Universe title five times and the Mr. Olympia title seven times before retiring. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1983.

12. John Ernst Steinbeck
( ), American writer and Nobel laureate, who described in his work the unremitting struggle of people who depend on the soil for their livelihood. Steinbeck was born on Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, Calif., sun of a Swiss immigrant, and educated at Stanford University. As a youth, he worked as a ranch hand and fruit picker. His Cup of Gold (1929) romanticizes the life and exploits of the famous 17th-century Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan. In The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a group of short stories depicting a community of southern California farmers, Steinbeck first dealt with the hardworking people and social themes associated with most of his works.

13. Henry Engelhard Steinway
Originally Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg ( ).
Henry lost most of his family when he was young. Several brothers were killed during the Napoleonic and he lost his father and remaining brother at age 15. Although he had no musical training, he displayed a talent in building musical instruments. The first instrument he built was a zither. In 1818, he started work in an organ builder's shop, learned how to play the organ, and became a church organist. He built his first piano in his kitchen in Seesen, which he presented to his bride Juliane Thiemer in February 1825 as a wedding gift. They later had seven children. The uprisings of in Germany did not leave the Steinweg family untouched. The business suffered and so he left for America in 1850, one year after his son Henry left for the new world. Upon arriving in America, he and his sons worked in a piano factory. He then founded Steinway & Sons on March 5, 1853.

14. Levi Strauss
( ). Levi Strauss, the man who gave the world blue jeans, was born in 1829 in Bavaria. Orphaned at 16 years of age, Levi Strauss decided to join his five brothers and sisters in the United States. In 1843, young Levi sailed from Bremerhaven to New York where his two older brothers, Jonas and Louis, had already established a successful wholesale textile and tailoring business. After a stay of two days in New York, he continued on to the ranch of his uncle, Daniel Goldman in Louisville Kentucky. There he spent the next five years learning the language and the ways of his new homeland in order that he might someday take over his uncle's ranch. But Levi had dreams of becoming an independent businessman, and for several years he walked the roads of Kentucky, selling cloth and notions from the pack on his back. In he returned to New York upon hearing reports of gold being discovered in California. He persuaded his two brothers to provide him with a supply of silk, cloth, and a few luxury items which he planned to sell in San Francisco. In addition he took a supply of canvas intended for the Conestoga Wagons made by German wheelwrights in Pennsylvania and used by many gold prospectors to cross the continent. In 1850 he took a ship for San Francisco. By the time he reached California he had sold everything to fellow passengers, except for the canvas.

15. William Edward Boeing
( ) founded Pacific Aero Products in Seattle in That aircraft manufacturing company later bore his own name. Boeing was born in Detroit where his German father, Wilhelm Böing ( ), had settled (1872) and prospered as a timber baron. William Boeing once visited his father's hometown of Hohenlimburg (now part of Hagen, Westphalia) where some Böing families still live. But it is difficult to research the family today because Boeing-made B-17 bombers destroyed the town's vital statistics records during WWII.

16. Sandra Bullock
(1964- ) has a German mother, Helga Meyer, who is an opera singer from Nuremberg, Germany. Bullock, one of Hollywood's most popular actresses, has appeared in "Speed," "While You Were Sleeping," and the two "Miss Congeniality" films. She came to fame in the 1990s and has since established her career as a well-known leading Hollywood actress. She was ranked as the 14th richest female celebrity with an estimated fortune of $85 million in early 2007

17. Stefanie 'Steffi' Graf
(1969- ) was the world's number one woman tennis player in the 1980s and 1990s. She won 22 Grand Slam singles titles. She retired from pro tennis in Born June 14, in Mannheim, Germany, Graf learned to play tennis from her father, Peter Graf. On October 22, 2001 Stefanie married American tennis champ Andre Agassi at his home in Las Vegas.

18. Henry J. Heinz
( ) was the founder and president of the H. J. Heinz Company (1869, as Heinz Noble & Company) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Henry (Heinrich) Heinz, was born in Kahlstadt, Bavaria, and came to America in In he married Anna Margaretta Schmitt, also from Germany, and a little more than a year later Henry John Heinz was born. The company's famous slogan, "57 varieties," was introduced by Heinz in The number was chosen merely for its sound, since even at that time Heinz was producing many more than 57 product varieties. Heinz revolutionized the way that food and condiments were marketed and sold.

19. Milton Hershey
( ) earned his fortune by appealing to people's sweet tooth and love of chocolate. Hershey was born on September 13, 1857, in a farmhouse near Derry Church, Pennsylvania. He was a descendant of immigrants who had come to Pennsylvania from Switzerland and Germany in the 1700s. Raised as a Mennonite, he attended school only through the fourth grade. After working in the candy/caramel business for several years in various places from Louisiana to Colorado, and following several business failures, Hershey purchased some German chocolate- making equipment for his plant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Hershey Chocolate Company was founded in 1894 and soon expanded to become one of the world's largest candy and food manufacturers. Hershey helped turn chocolate from an expensive Swiss-made delicacy into a confection that everyone could afford.

20. Lyman Frank Baum
(May 15, 1856 – May 5, 1919) was an American author, actor, and independent filmmaker best known as the creator, along with illustrator W. W. Denslow, of one of the most popular books in American children's literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, better known today as simply The Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a plethora of other works (55 novels in total, 82 short stories, over 200 poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings), and made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen.

21. Theodor Seuss Geisel
(March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American writer and cartoonist, better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss He published over 60 children's books, which were often characterized by his imaginative characters, rhyme and frequent use of trisyllabic meter. His most notable books include the bestselling classics Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including eleven television specials, three feature films and a Broadway musical.

22. Sources http://german.about.com/library/blfam_geramDEF.htm