Without going into the metrics that these rankings use and their flaws, the German university system unfortunately focuses less on "elite" universitities, instead trying to create a good average experience, so most of the universities are actually fairly on-par with each other in terms of funding, and therefore also research output, teaching, etc. That being said, my experience with high-prestige american universities has been that the expense has very little to do, and feeds very little into, the quality of the education. US universities are expensive because they have massive bureaucratic overhead and are funded through a peculiar model (Government gives money to people, which give money to universities).

Also, Germany used to have no tuition until the mid-2000s or so, and only some places introduced it, and it was really, really low.