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Did Germany "struggle" killing 6 million Jews? I think people may not be aware of how condensed the timeline of the Holocaust actually was. Part of this I think is reflective of "survivor's history", which I talked about before here: the people who survived the Holocaust and disproportionately shaped western perceptions of it were by necessity aberrations from the norm. They were mostly western Jews whose march to the death camps began after the large majority of Jews were already dead.
The vast majority of victims of the Holocaust were eastern European Jews, whose mass extermination was conducted in a fairly narrow timeframe (with the notable exception of Hungarian Jews). The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within six months of that mark, somewhere around a million Jews were dead - the victims of bullets, nationalist militias, POW camps, forced starvation, and experimental mobile gassing vans. In January 1942 Nazi bureaucrats assembled to plan the Final Solution, and by the end of that year roughly another 3 million Jews had died, mostly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. This brings us to roughly two-thirds of the final total within a span of 18 months. The purpose-built extermination camps built for Operation Reinhard operated for another half a year or so until they were sabotaged or dismantled, and by that time most of the remainder had been killed. The remaining Jews still to die at this point were mostly westerners or Hungarians who would mostly be poisoned by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz.
Why? Schnellbrief was issues on 1939-09-21, shortly after joint Nazi Germany and USSR invasion of Poland.
By 1940 expulsions/ghetto formation by Germans was going full strength. See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto
Up until September 1939 German policies were focused on forcing Jewish emigration from Germany. From the beginning of the war movement of Jews was curtailed for security reasons, and there were a series of massacres by invading forces in Poland; but this violence was not deliberate policy, merely tolerated. The deliberate, purposeful, mass killing of Jews (although this was still absent some larger unifying plan) did not start until Operation Barbarossa.
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Quite right, Holocaust deniers and everyone else is too fixated on gas chambers. The Shoah by bullets or starvation is just as important. Bullets are the traditional method of mass extermination, not these great big centralized, industrial operations.
I think the response to that would be that gas chambers are a big part of the narrative. I recall seeing some images from Maus (that book people got upset over last year) and it reminded me just how much the Holocaust is considered industrialized i.e people being killed by the most efficient mass process, and that this uniqueness, to me at least, seems to be an important point that is reinforced in the conventional narrative.
Maus itself doesn't particularly fixate on the industrial killing process. Indeed, the part where Vladek Spiegelman's (ie. Art Spiegelman's dad and the main character of the book, alongside Art Spiegelman) is in camp is actually not all that long, and much of it concentrates on how he got through the camp by being a crafty little shit (the entire comic's thesis is basically "Even if you're a Holocaust victim you can still be a huge shithead, like my dad, and it actually helps you survive").
Vladek is probably portrayed as going through more "danger moments" (ie. parts where Spiegelman portrays his life as if it's actually on line) outside of the camps than inside, though it's clear that inside there's a constant background danger of being selected for death if he doesn't find new ways to be useful.
Interesting to know, I haven't read it myself. That was just what it reminded me of from some history lessons almost a decade old now.
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