On December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler summoned his puppet parliament to the Reichstag building in Berlin, and delivered a fiery ninety-minute speech in which he declared war against the United States. Half the speech consisted of an extended, virulent personal attack on President Franklin Roosevelt. Hitler decided to declare war against the US without anything but cursory consultations with senior Nazis or military leaders. Soon after the end of the war, an official US State Department analysis of the conflict concluded that it found “the most baffling question in the whole…