I think it was Stalin who said "Quantity has a quality all its own."
Reading one of Stephen Ambrose's books on WWII, when veterans were asked which Europeans they admired the most, he was surprised that most of them said the Germans.
One veteran said that they would fight their way through a town and by time they reached the other side, the Germans were out in the street cleaning up, while in other countries the people were either complaining about the damage or were stealing anything they could from the Americans.
I’m considering a move from where I thought I would retire to another county that has a large German Mennonite influence. In just one county you go from front porch storage / junk yard to clean, neat and well tended farms. It is truly amazing how one group of people can motivate others by example.
As mentioned by others, the Germans are craftsmen, persnickety engineers and persnickety in just about everything else and I quite admire that but they also seem to have a moral bankruptcy and a blind adherence to following without discretion. In spite of being good engineers they can tend to not be very intellectually honest and will not easily concede to being wrong. In fact, they will often not even consider the possibility of being wrong and will persist in doing wrong things even after they know how wrong they are!