Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Cramoni. inspiring and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Kramon Institute.

I call this one like a soldier.

Stolberg was a German border town. American bombing and artillery had destroyed parts of it, and now Americans occupied it.

It was late in movie star, who's walking down Stolberg's streets,

accompanied by a US Army escort,

was a famous movie star,

whose U.S.O. uniform covered what were often referred to as the loveliest legs in

Hollywood. A local housewife recognized her, and soon she was surrounded by a crowd of admiring women and children.

There were practically no men in the town, and food was almost as scarce as men.

But some of the women went house to house collecting baking ingredients and made a simple cake,

which they presented to her as she departed.

Retelling the story a few months later, she was moved to tears.

She said that simple Stolberg pastry was more memorable than the Gourmet Petifors,

served to her in the salons of Paris.

It had made her believe that many Germans accepted and even supported her

for trading Nazi tyranny for freedom in America.

Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin in

in 1901.

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