[Jim K]

Some of that "German craftsmanship" hurt them in WWII. Almost up to the very end they stuck with the system of parts inspection and marking, pre-assembly, fitting and parts numbering, all methods of an earlier day. Who knows how many millions of man hours went into stamping microscopic inspector's marks on tiny parts or into assemblers marking each part to match the serial number. The whole thing was so completely absurd because their tooling, some of the best in the world, really did produce fully interchangeable parts, which still had to be inspected, marked, hand assembled, numbered, disassembled, finished, then reassembled because the 18th century rules said to do it that way.

Jim