Why are German universities so bad?

A recent post by Steve Sailer compares the Shanghai Jiao Tong and the QS-Times Higher Education Supplement rankings (although he refers to the London Times, a completely different publication).

He asserts

"This Chinese list seems less chauvinistically biased than the London Times rankings I cited in tonight's VDARE article (Harvard #1 in both, but Stanford is #2 on the Chinese list vs. #19 on the English list, behind a number of obscure provincial colleges in England). Because it's a better list, it supports the point I made in VDARE even more strongly than the previous list did: that America's exclusive universities are now enormously prestigious relative to Germany's and the rest of the world's.

German colleges that would have dominated the list 100 years ago have been hit hard by sincere, leftist anti-elitism"

That the Chinese rankings are less chauvinistic than QS-THES is absolutely correct. And if he is being deliberately offensive by describing Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial and University Colleges, London as "obscure provincial colleges in England", I suppose that I couldn't really argue.

But surely the decline of German universities began well before leftist anti-elitism appeared on the scene? Didn't it begin with the mass expulsion of Jewish students and academics after 1933?