I have been using US keyboard layouts for more than 20 years. You can get them relatively easily from German online retailers, even for notebooks. I've been working with Lenovo/Thinkpad hardware for 15 years now and eventually found the US variant for each model (also because Lenovo gives exact part numbers for each variant). I also own several external Thinkpad keyboards with this layout. The only problem is that you often can't configure them when you first buy the main unit. Therefore I have a stack of German keyboards lying around here :)