Not to downplay the importance of containment efforts I think there is something uniquely bad about Italy's mortality rates and something really good that the Germans are doing.

Based on the Johns Hopkins CSSE data for March 13

On March 13 Germany had 3675 confirmed cases and only 7 deaths. Adjusted for respective populations Italy was at this stage 9 days before with 3089 confirmed cases, by which time it has already seen 107 deaths. This projects 21x COVID19 mortality rate for Italy over Germany - what gives ?

Italy's outbreak is concentrated in Lombardy so maybe weighing for the population of that area rather than the entire country is more appropriate which means Germany is currently 16 rather than 9 days behind Italy but with mortality in Italy still being 13 times higher than Germany.

Possible explanations:

Italy's 3089 confirmed cases 9 days before are selected for severity - only people who arrived with acute symptoms were tested, whereas Germany's 3675 are the results of more proactive testing and are dominated by mild or non-symptomatic cases that would have passed undetected in Italy.

Italy squandered some of its hospital capacity on first-diagnosed-first-hospitalized basis regardless of severity and began triage too late wheres Germany does better job prioritizing hospital vs home treatment from the start.

9 days before Lombardy's hospitals were already over capacity with 3089 confirmed cases while Germany's still aren't today. Germany has 2.5x the hospital beds per population than Italy, let's assume this holds for ICU beds as well. If capacity is the sole/dominant factor in this and we say that 9 days before Italy was already over capacity with 3089 cases than Germany will have reached a similar over-capacity at around 10k confirmed cases in a few days and then its mortality rate will begin to climb.