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

by Brendan Simms

The importance of Lend-Lease actually grew as the war continued. This aid came via the Arctic, Iran, and Vladivostok.

What Lend-Lease gave them was a critical mobility that the Wehrmacht lacked. The speed of the Soviet advances from 1943 to 1945 would have been unthinkable without the American trucks and jeeps that transported men and supplies, the popular ration packs that fed them, or the radios that enabled communication between the spearheads and the generals.

By the end of the war, it is estimated that over half of the vehicles in the Red Army were originally American produced. The oil to fuel them also came overwhelmingly from the United States, which produced around 65 percent of the world’s petroleum at this time.

In his “Political Testament,”

Hitler reiterated his view that the war was “desired and provoked solely by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish origin or who worked for Jewish interests.”

Strikingly, this last will and testament made no direct mention of either Communism or the Soviet Union but inveighed instead against those Hitler saw as the real villains, “international money and finance conspirators” who treated the “peoples of Europe” like “blocks of shares.”

many alternative outcomes were discussed at the time. The world of August 1945 was only one of several that seemed possible in early December 1941. Japan might have attacked the Soviet Union to avenge the defeats of 1938–1939. Russia might have declared war on Japan in solidarity with the Western Allies. Hitler might have backed out of declaring war on the United States.167 Japan could have attacked the British Empire only, and not the Americans. Each of these alternatives, and their permutations, would have produced a substantially different world in 1945.

If Japan had attacked Britain but not the United States—Churchill’s nightmare scenario and one that Hitler had promoted in 1940 and early 1941—it would have been an even greater disaster than British planners had expected. Roosevelt would have struggled to persuade the US public to join the war. India might have fallen. A linkup of the Axis partners in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf would have been quite feasible. British resources would have been stretched to the breaking point, damaging Britain’s capacity to fight Hitler.

This was why Roosevelt feared any such Japanese move and did his best to deter it. This option was considered but rejected by Tokyo out of fear that the United States would intervene ...

Nobody can be sure how European Jewry would have fared if Hitler had not declared war on the United States on December 11, or on some later date. The Soviet Jews under Nazi control had already been murdered, and so had many others. But most European Jews were still alive, and Hitler’s plans for them were closely connected to his relationship with the United States. The deportation of the central and western European Jews had been planned some time before December 11, 1941, but as Hitler’s remarks on December 12 show, their situation deteriorated markedly from that day.

Again no source…

Of course, the future was not actually as open as it seemed on December 6, 1941. Hitler believed that war with the United States was inevitable, and he had promised the Japanese that he would support them. Thanks to their intelligence reports, Churchill and Roosevelt strongly suspected this. Likewise, Stalin knew that the Japanese were not planning to attack him in the east. But neither the two Western leaders nor the Soviet dictator could be entirely sure.

It is often claimed that Hitler attacked the United States in ignorance or in spite of its immense power. This is not so. As we have seen, he declared war on the United States because of its colossal industrial and demographic potential. In late 1941, the Führer saw a narrow window of opportunity not to defeat the United States outright but to create a self-sufficient Axis bloc strong enough to withstand it. Otherwise, he risked gradual strangulation.

Likewise, the Japanese felt the only alternative to accepting American hegemony was a desperate and probably doomed attempt to secure the economic basis for an independent existence.

Conflict between the Axis powers and the United States was inescapable for geopolitical, economic, and ideological reasons. Their defeat was also inevitable, but Germany and Japan could still choose the manner of their destruction, and they chose the most terrible.

The idea that Hitler considered the Jews “hostages” whose fate depended on American behavior is well established in the literature.

As Mommsen notes, even before Hitler deployed it, “the notion of using the Jews as hostages in order to prevent the Western powers from inflicting damage on Germany was familiar to the fanatical anti-Semites of the