German Resistance Memorial Center
- Biographies

The trained concert violinist Marlene Dietrich turned to acting in the late 1920s and gained roles on the stage and screen. The 1930 movie The Blue Angel was her international breakthrough. She moved to the United States that same year to work for Paramount Studios. Dietrich and the emigrated director Ernst Lubitsch campaigned on behalf of German Jewish emigrants and victims of political persecution from 1933. In 1937 she vehemently rejected an offer from Adolf Hitler to return to Germany. Marlene Dietrich applied for US citizenship, which was granted in 1939. After the beginning of the war against the United States, she also provided financial support for the fight against Hitler. As an entertainer in the United Service Organization, she performed for American troops and German prisoners of war in north Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany. After 1945, Marlene Dietrich received numerous international honors but was defamed as a "traitor to her country" for many years in Germany. She died in Paris in 1992.