Abstract
Adolf Hitler's declaration of war against the United States on 11 December 1941 has long been a major mystery. As late as September 1941, Hitler ‘was adamant in ruling out war with the US not just for the near future, but for his entire lifetime’ (p. 67). Amazingly, a month after Germany's declaration of war, he told intimates that he had ‘no knowledge of how to defeat the United States,’ and subsequently that ‘should this war turn out to be winnable at all, it will only be won by America’. (p. 543) Why, if he believed war with America was potentially disastrous in the autumn of 1941 and unwinnable in January 1942, did he declare war on the United States?
Historians have long been unsure what to make of Hitler's decision. The first generation of postwar scholarship described Hitler's decision as either an irrational act driven by ignorance of American economic might or an ideologically driven mistake. More recent works have tried to offer a strategic basis for Hitler's decision, with arguably mixed results. Schmider, a senior lecturer in the War Studies Department at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, wades into this debate with a rich and provocative new account.
Over ten chapters, covering topics ranging from Hitler's health, German aircraft procurement, economic planning, and German-Japanese diplomacy, Schmider debunks a number of previous claims about Hitler's decision for war. In chapter two, for instance, he argues that Hitler—whom he concludes was in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease—was not influenced in his decision by disease, drug abuse, or fear of death, as some past historians and popular authors have claimed. He likewise rejects the argument that fresh opportunities to sink US shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic influenced the Führer's thinking. He also dismisses the idea that anti-Semitism played a decisive role in Hitler's decision vis-à-vis the United States.
Instead, Schmider aims to examine exactly what Hitler knew, and when. The evidence presented overturns several previously held assumptions. For instance, crucially, Hitler did not yet know that his invasion of the USSR had failed when he decided upon war. Senior German commanders, bullish on Operation Typhoon, were either unaware or unwilling to tell Hitler of the turning tide at the front. As late as 12 December 1941, Hitler discussed the imminent fall of Leningrad and ordered the release of 70,000 soldiers to civilian industry, strongly suggesting he was unaware of the unfolding catastrophe. As Schmider argues, ‘13 December is the day on which the deteriorating situation in the main theatre of the war (that is, outside Moscow) first starts to have an impact on his [Hitler's] perception of the developing crisis in the East’ (pp. 350–351).
Hitler also had information on other fronts that would rapidly prove out of date. He believed that the United States faced key economic bottlenecks—particularly rubber—which would handicap the US war effort. As it turned out, artificial rubber production in the US was just beginning, and would eventually prove hugely successful. Hitler also believed that Germany would soon have bombers capable of reaching targets in the United States, which he thought would have a deterrent effect on US behavior. But only three of the Me-264 would be built before technical issues and resource shortages scrapped the project the following year. Finally, uncertainty about Japanese intentions and plans made him eager to grasp any opportunity at the alliance, yet, as events revealed, the Japanese proved largely unwilling to play along with Hitler's grand strategy by attacking the USSR, or even interdicting Lend-Lease shipping arriving in Vladivostok.
Schmider suggests that the information Hitler had created a brief window between 17 November and 13 December where he favoured a declaration of war. That window opened when the US government revised the Neutrality Acts, suggesting to Hitler that American entry into the war was imminent in any case; he believed he could profit strategically from joining Japan in a declaration of war. Within weeks, though, he realized his mistake. Once the Soviet winter counter-offensive conclusively demonstrated the Red Army was far from beaten, he concluded that he had overcommitted Germany.
Schmider does a remarkable job of bringing into coherence the disparate and wildly contradictory statements made by Hitler about war with the United States. Instead, he paints a portrait of a leader who saw a phantom chance to win a new ally without endangering the prospects of the German victory in Europe. Astoundingly, Hitler apparently decided upon a war that December without consulting anyone; only in a regime devoid of checks and balances, with subordinates fanatically loyal or cowed into submission, could such a rash decision be made so rapidly and so unilaterally. In the end, that disastrous choice would doom the German war effort—and Hitler with it.