What makes you think this would have taken hours in Germany? Those things are highly locality dependent, since it's the "Ordnungsamt" of the local municipality

What makes you think this would have taken hours in Germany? Those things are highly locality dependent, since it's the "Ordnungsamt" of the local municipality that does this. In my big Bavarian city I would expect it to be very fast, from past experiences. They definitely streamlined their processes over the last two decades. For the "Einwohnermeldeamt" 2015 and then COVID forced them to, before that waiting times there were much longer, but now it's fine.