Hitler: The Most Baffling Question

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 Nazi story to be the prompt German declaration of war on the United States”. This view has been repeatedly echoed by subsequent historians. “The underlying logic of the Führer’s policy towards the United States defies analysis … It was an irrational act” is a typical example. My aim here is to see if Hitler’s strange decision can be rationally explained.

A number of points should be made about this event. Hitler did indeed have a treaty with Japan, enacted in 1940, which obliged Germany to declare war on any country which attacked Japan. But as Robert Waite has succinctly summarised the matter, “This is not what happened at Pearl Harbor.” Hitler’s official declaration of war against the US was, in fact, the only time, in his long career of unprovoked aggression, that he ever formally declared war against another country. It should also be noted that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor came out of the blue, a secret known only to a handful of senior leaders in Japan’s military-led government headed by Hideki Tojo. Contrary to what many fringe historians have asserted, Roosevelt had no prior knowledge of the attack. Nor, more strangely, did Hitler, who heard of it from his press chief Otto Dietrich, who learned of it by listening to Reuters East Asian radio. The Japanese ambassadors to America and Germany also had no advance knowledge of the attack.

There is universal agreement that by declaring war against the United States, Hitler in effect signed his own death warrant, gratuitously bringing into the conflict the world’s strongest nation, both in economic terms and, once it was at war, in military terms, its war-making potential dwarfing that of any other nation. The American economy was already by far the strongest in the world. By one estimate of Gross Domestic Product, in international dollars at 1990 prices, in billions of dollars in 1940, the figure for the US was $943 billion, compared with $316 billion for the UK, $417 billion for the USSR, and $405 billion for Germany. It out-produced virtually the whole of the outside world in a range of products from cars—in 1940 America manufactured 3.5 million cars, more than the rest of the world combined—to consumer goods, in an economy geared to mass production which could easily be transformed into producing military goods on a mass scale. In Admiral Yamamoto’s apocryphal but oft-quoted phrase, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor: “We have awakened a sleeping giant.”

Moreover, the United States had another notable advantage compared with any of the other major combatants: its mainland was absolutely invulnerable to attack by its enemies. Germany had no planes which could reach any part of the continental United States, and never developed any. While, by 1945, many of the cities in Germany, Britain, Japan and Russia lay in ruins, America’s urban areas were untouched. On the contrary, once it entered the war, America had what was often described as a “permanent aircraft carrier” in Great Britain, from which thousands of American bombers, together with those of the RAF, set out to destroy Germany’s infrastructure and cities, and which was the staging point for the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who would help liberate Europe after D-Day.

Once America entered the war, its vast resource base enabled it to embark on projects impossible for any other nation to carry out. From August 1942 America embarked on the Manhattan Project, at a cost of $2 billion and employing 130,000 workers, which entailed building four massive project sites across the US, the largest at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in order to manufacture a weapon the likes of which had never been seen before in history, and of which it was unclear not merely whether it would work but whether it could work. The atomic bomb was first successfully tested in July 1945, two months after Germany surrendered, but was, of course, used with deadly effect against Japan. By the end of the war in 1945, America had 13,000,000 men and women in its armed forces. But, because of its vast productive capacity, much of America continued to be what it was before the war, constituting a near normal society at home. For instance, both Broadway and Hollywood continued as before. The first Broadway musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (in March 1943) and Carousel (in April 1945) premiered during the war, while Hollywood continued to churn out hundreds of pictures, some memorable, like Casablanca, released in November 1942.

If Hitler were rational, he should have understood America’s vast wartime capacity and potential from his memories of the First World War, in which America’s entry into the war in April 1917 in effect won the conflict for the Allies. While in April 1917 the US had no troops in France, by October 1918, just before the Armistice, it had 1,868,000 troops there, while Britain had 1,859,000. The American Commander-in-Chief, General John Pershing, was in the process of building an American army of 4,000,000 men which, if the war lasted until 1919, was to invade and occupy Germany; he said, in effect, that if Britain and France wanted to tag along to help, that was fine, but America would win the war itself if necessary. Most studies of Hitler, however, conclude that he had little or no respect for America’s military ability, a fact that may have contributed to his decision to declare war against it.

Hitler’s catastrophic mistake of December 11, 1941, has continued to puzzle and intrigue historians, being discussed in all accounts of the war. Last year saw the publication of two large-scale studies of his decision, Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and the German March to Global War by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman (Allen Lane) and Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation: Why Germany Declared War on the United States by Klaus H. Schmider (Cambridge University Press). It is far from clear, however, whether any consensus has been reached. One view popular among historians is that the Pearl Harbor attack, in the words of Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (2009):

united the American people behind intervention in the war. And it also prompted Hitler to throw off the restraints he had hitherto shown towards the US. He now authorised the sinking of American ships in the Atlantic, to disrupt and if possible cut off US supplies to Britain and the Soviet Union. Then, gambling on America’s preoccupation with the Pacific, he issued a formal declaration of war on 11 December 1941 … Hitler believed that the Japanese attack would weaken the Americans by dividing their military efforts.

But this explanation makes no logical sense. If Hitler had not declared war on the United States, America would have found itself at war with Japan and only with Japan. An enraged American public, thirsting for revenge for the 3000 Americans killed in Japan’s unprovoked attack in Hawaii, would have demanded the strongest military action against Japan, and put Germany on the back burner, quite possibly with less willingness to provide Lend-Lease aid to Britain and Russia.

During the few days between Pearl Harbor (December 7) and Hitler’s declaration of war (December 11) this outcome is exactly what Britain feared above all: that America would use its vast military capacity against Japan, sidelining any efforts to defeat Hitler. This fear was deeply felt by Winston Churchill, who, in that brief period, “remained fearful that Japanese aggression would be targeted in such a way as to leave the United States out of the war” against Germany, causing him to seem “tired and depressed” when he met with the American ambassador shortly after the Japanese attack. By declaring war against America, Hitler had precisely the opposite effect of what he might have intended, making Germany the main thrust of America’s war effort, rather than diverting its anger and resources exclusively to Japan.

Probably the most popular view of the matter is that, by declaring war on the US, Hitler could now attack American ships delivering Lend-Lease goods to Britain and Russia, which he could not without the declaration of war, and that Germany could then sink enough of these ships to win the war against Russia. This interpretation is far more plausible, and German U-boats did initially sink many American ships, but the argument runs up against the fact that the convoy system ended the same threat in the First World War, and that, by bringing America into the war, its vast resource base was now used to support the Allies.

Hitler’s decision should also be seen in the context of Germany being unable to quickly defeat the Soviet Union, with Germany now facing the dire effects for its troops there caused by the Russian winter, and of Russia’s successful attempts to rearm and bring vastly more troops to the front. By December 1, 1941, Stalin had added 194 new divisions to the front with Germany. Hitler may have gambled that his U-boat strategy alone would be enough to win the war, but it was a gamble he was virtually certain to lose in the long run.

The decision to declare war against America has also often been linked with the convening of the so-called Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, at which the decision to embark on the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, and the creation of the extermination camps, was officially made. That the conference was somehow linked to Germany’s declaration of war against the US is accepted by most historians, although the evidence may not be altogether compelling. The problem here is that the conference was planned for December 9, 1941, with invitations to attendees issued by Heydrich, presumably on Hitler’s direct instructions via Heinrich Himmler, on November 29—in other words, before Pearl Harbor, of which Hitler had no pre-existing knowledge. Had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor, the conference would thus have been held before Germany declared war on the US, assuredly with the same outcome for the Jews.

The motives for Hitler’s decision thus remain mysterious, although finding rational explanations for many of Hitler’s wartime actions is often almost impossible. What is clear is that by declaring war against the US, Hitler virtually guaranteed that Germany and the Axis powers would lose the war, and that the Nazi regime would be destroyed. Given the range of Hitler’s often illogical and bizarre decisions—he was at war with the three strongest political units in the world, the United States, the Soviet Union and the British Empire, without defeating any of them—the conclusion of some historians, that he had a “death wish” which became more and more evident as the war proceeded and, for Germany, ran progressively downhill, may be the most fruitful way of viewing his decisions, especially his declaration of war against the US, however much one would like a clearer explanation.

William D. Rubinstein held chairs of History at Deakin University and at the University of Wales. He is a frequent contributor to Quadrant