Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War

by Brendan Simms

In the end, it was Hitler who declared war on the United States on December 11, rather than the other way around. Among those who do remember this order of events, the declaration is considered an inexplicable strategic blunder by Hitler, sealing the fate of his regime. But in reality, Hitler’s declaration of war was a deliberate gamble, driven by his geopolitical calculations, his assessment of the balance of manpower and matériel, and, above all, his obsession with the United States and its global influence.

Between the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, five days passed during which the future of those disconnected struggles was decided, and every major power was forced to commit to one of two camps.

many Americans remained unconvinced that the United States needed to entangle itself in an additional conflict with the German Reich.

Hitler was being advised that, as Japan had initiated the conflict with the United States, Germany was under no obligation to support its ally by joining in a declaration of war.

German diplomats made their leader aware that Roosevelt was determined to avoid simultaneous hostilities in the Pacific and Atlantic and had no intention of issuing a declaration against Germany.

The Nazi dictator was convinced that the US president, international “plutocratic” capitalism, and “world Jewry” were together bent on his destruction. For Hitler, Jews were not only responsible for the actions of Roosevelt, but potentially a weapon that could be used against him. For three years, Hitler had explicitly held European Jewry hostage to secure the good behavior of the Americans.

Hitler believed that the threat of further violence against European—especially central and western European—Jews would deter their supposed agent, President Roosevelt, from intervening directly in the European war.

In 1939, Hitler had delivered his infamous warning that the consequences of a world at war would be the annihilation of the Jews.

Powerful narratives like Churchill’s “sleep of the saved” have distorted our memory of this period, but history was being rewritten before 1941 was even over.

For Hitler,

the two conflicts between Germany and the USA were inspired by the same force

Jewish international finance,

Although the Wilhelmine Reich had awaited the blow passively, Hitler vowed to strike first, announcing the start of open hostilities against the United States.

The interwar Anglo-American relationship was ambivalent.

But to much of the rest of the world, US-British accord appeared to prevail based on a shared heritage and common strategic, economic, and racial interests.

Hatred and envy of the Anglo-Saxon world system was something that German racists, Japanese expansionists, Soviet Communists, and anti-colonial activists could all agree on.

Adolf Hitler

1...

feared and admired the “Anglo-Saxons,” as he also came to call them, who he believed wielded the power of international capitalism, which he otherwise associated with “world Jewry.” In his view, Germany had been racially hollowed out by the emigration of its “best” elements to “fertilize” the new world, especially the United States.

Throughout the decade, Hitler focused intensely on the industrial power, natural resources, territorial extent, and supposed “racial” quality of the United States.

The main focus of his unpublished Second Book in 1928 was the overwhelming power of Anglo-America, and especially of the United States.

The solution, Hitler argued, lay in the removal of Jewish influence from Germany and in the seizure of new Lebensraum (living space) in the east, into which he would channel future German settlement.

Above all, Roosevelt was determined to avoid committing the United States to policies that Americans were ultimately unwilling to fulfill,

In January 1939, Hitler connected the emerging global coalition against him with the “Jewish question”

Hitler was sending an explicit message, at least as he saw it: European Jews would be held responsible for the behavior of “international finance Jewry” not just in Europe but also in New York and in Roosevelt’s America generally.63 The Jews were in effect to be his hostages.

Hitler

asked the Washington embassy and other experts to establish the date by which the United States could practically intervene if war broke out in Europe in the course of the next year. It was no longer a question of whether war with America would come, but when.

Hitler accompanied his military confrontation with the Western powers with an escalation of his anti-Semitic rhetoric, framing the war as a contest between the satiated and the deprived nations. He asserted that the aim of the “Jewish-capitalist world enemy” was to “destroy Germany” and “the German people.” This was because the Third Reich represented a youthful, dynamic, and popular challenge to the international ruling elite, which he understood in national and generational rather than in class terms.

The outbreak of war was accompanied by the radicalization of Nazi measures against the Jews. Hitler viewed European Jewry both as a fifth column that had to be eliminated and, as we have seen, as a hostage for the good behavior of the United States.

The emerging Axis’s common ideological platform was thus far more anti-Anglo-American and anti-plutocratic than it was anti-Soviet or anti-Bolshevik.

The main target of the Tripartite Pact, therefore, was the United States;

For Roosevelt’s part, the Tripartite Pact confirmed his belief that the conflicts in Asia and Europe were part of a broader global struggle between dictatorship and democracy.

Nazi moves to create a continental bloc were accompanied by anti-Anglo-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-imperialist rhetoric.

Echoing a common theme in contemporary discourse, Hitler described the British Empire and the United States as the haves of the world order, and the German Reich as the leader of the have-nots.

In Hitler’s reading, inequality was manifested at both the national and the class levels, and the two were connected. Germany as a whole was subject to an international ruling class, which had divided Germans from each other. This meant that Germany had been left behind in the global distribution of territory, with less space per person than any other major European state. The implication was clear: Germany might own large tracts of Europe, but in global terms it was still poor. It did yet not have enough, and the combination of British resistance and a likely future American intervention blocked Hitler from seizing what Germany required.

In December 1940, Hitler decided to break the deadlock through an attack on Russia. He did so not because he considered Stalin his main enemy—quite the contrary. Hitler still had the Anglo-Saxon and plutocratic powers firmly in his sights.

Really? This seems wrong…

Rather, the elimination of the Soviet Union would, in his view, kill several birds with one stone. First, it would force the British to give up any hopes of Stalin entering the war on their side, and thus make them amenable to a negotiated peace. Second, it would deter the United States from intervening by creating an overwhelming German preponderance in Europe and denying Roosevelt a potential major ally on the mainland. Third, control of the cornfields of the Ukraine and the minerals of the Donbass and Caucasus would allow the Reich to outlast the British blockade. And fourth, the seizure of living space in the east would put the future of the German people on the sounder footing Hitler had been calling for since the 1920s.

Soviet Jews were targeted as Communist partisans—that is, as enemy combatants—and Bolshevik ideological adversaries.119 Hitler did not need to invade the Soviet Union to murder Jews or take them hostage; he already had millions of central and western European Jews under his control.

Also seems wrong, and assumes the hostage thesis, which hasn't been supported by evidence…

The campaign against the Soviet Jews was embedded in a broader ideological war against Bolshevism,

The connection in Hitler’s mind between the Jews, capitalism, and American policy toward Germany was thus clear.

From the German perspective, signs of a forthcoming direct American intervention were accumulating.

A clash of two ordering concepts—Nazi Lebensraum and Anglo-American liberty, one even more limitless than the other—was inevitable. The message to Hitler from Roosevelt and his supporters in the American public could not have been clearer. There was no room for the Third Reich, and Hitler knew it. If the Americans were securing the Western Hemisphere today, tomorrow it would be the world.

This is a lot to hang on a Henry Luce quote…

Hitler

saw himself in a battle of production not only with the formidable British Empire but also (via Lend-Lease) with the United States.

His main emphasis in early 1941 was thus not on immediate output for the planned attack on Russia, but investment to enable subsequent increases in aerial and naval production to fight Britain and America.

the combined economies of the British Empire and United States

considerably exceeded that of the German Grossraum.

Hitler’s strategy now hinged upon

persuade Japan to act in the Far East as quickly as possible.”

the alliance with Japan was primarily conceived as an instrument against Britain and a deterrent against the United States.