Of course, this relates to the entire layout, not only are they there but also the special characters are a bit different on German keyboards.
Is it worth ordering a laptop with a US keyboard and simply setting German input and painting over the corresponding keys with white marker? Or would I miss keys because the German one has more
There's a term ASCII. This can be used to represent characters using numbers. Hold down Alt-Large and enter the number. Alt 55 is the 7 as an example. Sometimes it helps to press all the buttons. I would test whether the ASCII code also works for umlauts. Sometimes there are ASCII tables on the Internet or there were programs that displayed that.