There are probably thousands of infections in the country already, we just don't know it yet.
Now try Italy or South Korea. Germany still has twice as many cases as the US, and 7.5x as many cases per million of population (12.1 vs 1.6 CPM in the US). Proximity to Italy doesn't do them any favors. To their credit though, they have zero deaths.
If you order the stats by cases per million, the US comes in 40th, so containment doesn't suck too bad, compared to others. By deaths it's the 5th though - the main cluster basically took out a bunch of very old, medically problematic folks at a senior care facility. As the officials from the facility said, about 7 people die there per month under the normal circumstances, but this month they were additionally hit with the coronavirus. Bad luck.
Worth noting that Germany not having any deaths despite such a large number of cases can also indicate that they discover the infection very early, and similarly the number of US deaths can indicate late discovery.