Historian James Hawes, the author of The Shortest History of Germany, traces it back to medieval times when the western Rhineland became renowned abroad for commercial efficiency thanks to its production of highly specialized goods.
Prussia, the heavily Protestant eastern German state, was considered the source of a different type of efficiency: administrative and military. By 1750, under the rule of Fredrick the Great, Prussia had developed an efficient state bureaucracy and military power.
As Prussia expanded its control, eventually unifying the German Empire under its leadership in 1871, it spread these systems and practices. Its tax-based public schools and its professionalized army were also admired abroad for being organized and modern, with some foreign nations even seeking to institute similar models at home.
The 19th-century Prussian state also strategically cultivated a catalog of values for civil servants and the military, including punctuality, frugality, a sense of duty, and diligence, etc. While efficiency is not seen as having been a standalone value, the values that were espoused were aimed at supporting the desired efficient state.
As British tourists began to visit Prussian-controlled Rhineland in the mid-19th century, they took back an image of Prussian wealth and expediency. According to Hawes, their reports often commented on how everything seemed to work: "The trains — the classic thing — the trains run on time. The customs man is quick. The hotels are clean, the water works," he said, summarizing their descriptions.
The dual strands of economic quality and an organized state kept the image of German efficiency alive into the 20th-century. By the 1930s, the idea of "Ordnung" — a mixture of rules and a no-nonsense approach that can theoretically contribute to efficiency — was Germany's international calling card. Time magazine placed then-President Paul von Hindenburg on its 1934 cover with the words "Ordnung muss sein" (There must be order,) while The New York Times had already called the phrase "world-famous" in 1930.
Franklin Mixon, an economics professor specializing in labor and industrial organizations at Columbus State University, is the author of A Terrible Efficiency: Entrepreneurial Bureaucrats and the Nazi Holocaust. The book describes how efficient behavior was incentivized and rewarded within the large Nazi bureaucracy, often on a direct and informal basis — a contrast to the passive "just following orders" idea that still heavily dominates perceptions of how the Holocaust was carried out: "What they [the Nazis] were harnessing was incentivization, squeezing discretionary effort out of members of the bureaucracy, an above-and-beyond effort that is not part of the job description."
