It's a myth. Germans are methodical and risk-averse, but definitely not efficient. Things to get stuck at the precise point in time when they were over-engineered, and never move from there.

As a result, German bureaucracy tends to rely solely on paper and in-person appointments. With every state, every city, every office and every employee having their own interpretation of a procesd, you get an unpredictable, opaque, drawn out process that drives people mad.

There is a famous Asterix and Obelix scene about an office that drives people mad with bureaucracy. The protagonists are hunting for the Pass A38. This scene is better known in German than in its original French for a reason.

I think its overgeneralizing, but mostly accurate to say that the human-free constructs built by the Germans are quite efficient, but the human processes, systems, and interactions by which they get to these other results are byzantine at best, Kafkaesque at worst.

Perhaps the two are even related. American companies will reach 3 9's of reliability for a device, call it sufficient, and ship a product. German companies will be engaged with not only internal stakeholders, but also various levels of government for weeks to months just to come to an agreement about what the acceptable threshold is (it's the highest asked for by the combined pool of stakeholders), and 18 months after the Americans hit the market, you'll have a wristwatch with 7 9's of reliability that costs 3x as much as the American one.