Hitler Declares War on America

Germany Declares War on America

Japan’s attack on Oahu (7 December 1941) took place when Germany was the mightiest nation on earth. It gave Hitler a tremendous, if temporary, lift. "The turning point!" he exclaimed when he heard that the Japanese had hit Pearl Harbor.

To Walter Hewel, an official from the foreign ministry assigned to Hitler’s staff, he made a startling statement. "Now it is impossible for us to lose the war!" he said, wildly exaggerating the strength of Imperial Japan, which, along with Mussolini’s Italy, was his partner in the Axis alliance. "We now have an ally," claimed Hitler, "who has never been vanquished in 3,000 years!"

The German dictator personally congratulated the Japanese ambassador to Berlin for his country’s success in catching US forces off guard: "You gave the right declaration of war! This method is the only proper one!"

Japanese Aircraft
Heading for Pearl Harbor

The source of Hitler’s confidence at the time of Pearl Harbor was simple: he imagined that the Japanese would tie down American resources indefinitely.

FDR would do everything in his power to stop the advance of fascism, but the president faced some very basic problems. Immediately after the beginning of hostilities with Japan, he doubted that the American people would tolerate a simultaneous war with Germany. It was the Japanese who had killed American sailors and soldiers on US territory in Hawaii. It was the Japanese that American citizens most feared and wanted to punish. They had no equal grudge against the German dictator.

Ultimately, it was Hitler and Mussolini’s declaration of war against the US on 11 December 1941, that overcame American opposition to a crusade against all the fascist powers.

Interestingly, Nazi Germany had signed no treaty that bound Hitler to support Japanese aggression. He was committed to taking on the US only in the event that America initiated hostilities.

What most drew Hitler into declaring war on the US was the very grandiosity of the thing. Not far beneath the surface, he was wildly excited that he was now the central figure in what had become the widest war in human history.

Attempting to justify his decision for war during a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler concentrated on goading FDR, whom he called "the main culprit of this war." As he proceeded in his charges against America, he echoed US isolationists who said that Roosevelt counted on foreign adventures to divert attention from the New Deal’s failure to mend the American economy.

From behind Hitler’s bravado, however, seeped out some very real concerns over the way the war was unfolding. He kept repeating that the people of the US lacked fighting spirit, but he also voiced respect for America’s industrial might. Before the American blood shed at Pearl Harbor excited his lust for war with the US, Hitler had hoped that the Japanese would either attack the Soviet Far East or limit themselves to taking such Asian outposts of European colonialism as British Singapore, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies.

Eventually Hitler would reveal the full extent of his reservations about fighting the United States. "This war against America is a tragedy," he told Martin Bormann, the Nazi party secretary. "Germany and the United States should have been able to support each other without undue strain on either of them."

Joseph Stalin, as Hitler realized, would be the foremost beneficiary of the Axis war with the US, for the Soviet dictator could now be sure that Japanese forces would be spreading out further into east Asia and the Pacific, not moving north and west to invade Siberia. Units of the Red Army that had long been tied down in the Soviet Far East could now be redeployed to Europe to fight the Germans in Russia and the Ukraine.

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