by Ian Kershaw
General Walter Warlimont, second in charge to General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s chief adviser on operational planning, underlined the charge of amateurish, ill-conceived strategy imposed through spontaneous decisions taken without consultation or reflection. He himself had just heard the news of the declaration of war in Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia, where he was just discussing the implications with some staff officers, when Jodl telephoned him from Berlin on the afternoon of 11 December. ‘You have heard that the Führer has just declared war on America?’ Jodl asked. ‘Yes and we couldn’t be more surprised,’ Warlimont replied. Jodl pointed out that it was urgently necessary now to consider where the United States might deploy her forces. Warlimont agreed, adding that ‘so far we have never even considered a war against the United States and so have no data on which to base this examination’.12
The decision to declare war on the United States, Warlimont recalled, ‘was another entirely independent decision on which no advice from the Wehrmacht had either been asked or given; as a result we were now faced with a war on two fronts in the most serious conceivable form. Hitler’s war plan had hitherto aimed at the rapid elimination of Russia as "a factor of military importance” in order subsequently to use the concentrated power of the Wehrmacht to bring the war in the west to an end. Now the best that could be hoped for was to escape being crushed between two enemies in east and west whose combined war potential was vastly superior to our own.’13 Warlimont took the view that Hitler was ‘literally mesmerized by his own concept of the political situation and did not take the military implications adequately into account’.14
Hitler, then, had declared war on such a powerful nation as the United States abruptly, without consultation with his military strategists (except, presumably, the ultra-loyalist Jodl and the head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the toadying Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel), without anything approaching proper preparation for such a conflict, and, as Dönitz recalled, without taking cognizance of immediate logistical considerations. Nor had a declaration of war been formally necessary or in any way binding on Germany. Hitler had stated in his Reichstag speech that the declaration had been in accordance with the terms of the Tripartite Pact. But this was not the case. Ribbentrop (according to his later, self-serving account) had reminded Hitler that Germany was bound under the pact only to aid Japan if she were to be attacked by a third party.15 Since Japan had attacked America, not the other way round, Germany was not committed to intervene. The leading official in the German Foreign Ministry, State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, later pointed out the great surprise at Hitler’s claim in his speech that Germany had been obliged under the Tripartite Pact to declare war on the United States. He saw this as ‘legally an error and politically a mistake’.16
The surprise and foreboding, not just among ordinary Germans but among those in Hitler’s entourage and in the highest circles of government and the military, at the declaration of war on the United States provide a clear indication that the opening of hostilities with America was seen as neither a foregone conclusion nor an outright necessity. Even in the eyes of Germany’s military and diplomatic leaders there had been a choice. Hitler had faced options, and chosen war with the United States. As he himself viewed it, of course, a state of war had already existed in practice in the Atlantic, and in the fact of direct American support for Britain, then also for the Soviet Union. But we have seen reason to suppose that the ‘undeclared war’ in the Atlantic could, from Roosevelt’s perspective, have continued into the indefinite future, even after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Hitler was well aware of Roosevelt’s difficulties with American public opinion, and even more so of his problems with Congress. He knew that the American President had only by the narrowest of margins attained support for an extension of the Selective Service Act in August 1941, and how he had not dared risk asking Congress for a declaration of war until the blatant Japanese act of aggression in the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December. Even after the declaration of war on Japan, there was absolutely no guarantee that Roosevelt would have secured a congressional mandate for war against Germany. Hitler took that difficult, even unenviable, question away from Roosevelt on 11 December.
Yet Hitler had the Pacific diversion he wanted even without a declaration of war on America. And he knew no way at this point of defeating the United States. His U-boats could certainly attack American shipping in the Atlantic. But he had no means of attacking the American mainland, bombing cities in the United States or disrupting the build-up of her military might. Now, with the declaration of war, the pressure of time–the urgency of attaining complete victory in Europe and acquiring economic strength and military muscle to be able to defeat, or at least fend off, the United States–had become even more acute. Time was less than ever on Germany’s side. As Hitler knew, within two years or so the Americans expected to have a huge land army ready to fight on the European continent. It took in reality somewhat longer than expected for this ‘second front’, so eagerly awaited by Stalin, to materialize (though the landing in north Africa, then the push up through southern Italy, did commence in 1943), and the invasion of Nazi-occupied western Europe, which Britain could never have carried out without American help, began only in June 1944. But with his decision on 11 December 1941 Hitler had gone a long way towards sealing Germany’s eventual fate. It seems exactly the move which he should have avoided at all costs. It looks like madness, even from a distant vantage point in time. Why, independently of advice, and at a critical juncture of the bitter contest for supremacy on the eastern front, did he opt for war against a new and extremely powerful enemy in the west, and one he did not know how to defeat? Just how puzzling was this decision?
I
In terms of the politics of international power, the United States had figured only on the fringes of Hitler’s thoughts before the late 1930s. He was concentrated squarely upon Europe. America, in another hemisphere and determined, it seemed, to follow the political path of isolationism, was largely irrelevant to Hitler’s conception of future German foreign policy.
The economic potential and racial composition of the United States nevertheless had implications for his ideological construct–how he saw Germany’s current problems and future hopes. Characteristically, his central ideas of ‘living space’ and race held the key to his image of America. In America’s vast country, with a dominant white ‘Nordic’ racial core, to which he attributed her economic success and high standard of living, he saw a model for his vision of German ‘living space’ in Europe.17 America’s economic advancement had been made possible in his view not simply (as was generally presumed) by technological innovation and modern rationalization of management and production, but by territorial expansion to fit the growing population: by colonizing the west ‘after the white man had shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand’.18 This matched his view of how German prosperity and dominance of Europe could only be attained by expansion–and this, ‘by the sword’. By the beginning of the 1930s Hitler regarded America in economic terms as ‘the toughest rival possible’.19 He did not spell out the wider implications of this in public, though by now he had contemplated them in private. At some dim and distant future date, a German-dominated Europe would have to face a contest for supremacy with the United States. This implication was reinforced–though the reinforcement was unspoken–by another unwavering strand of his image of America: that it was a country, though with a good racial stock in its white population, dominated by Jewish capital, and by Jewish control of politics and culture.20
During the 1920s Hitler’s image of America (apart from its peculiarly vehement antisemitic content and additional heavy focus on Freemasonry) had largely matched widespread stereotypes in right-wing circles in Germany. Unsurprisingly, in the early years of his political ‘career’, America’s role in the First World War–which he saw as dictated by the interests of Jewish finance capital and Freemasonry–was the point of reference. Alongs
ide this went expressions of hatred for President Woodrow Wilson, widely condemned on the German Right for what was seen as his part in bringing about the ‘November Revolution’ in 1918, then the national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty the following June.21 In one of his very earliest speeches, in December 1919, Hitler ranked America alongside Britain as Germany’s ‘absolute enemies’, a conventional view such a short time after the First World War. For America, he reckoned, money, even drenched with blood, was all that mattered. His association of America with the power of the Jews followed promptly: ‘For the Jew, the money-purse is the most sacred object.’ America, he concluded, was bound to have joined in the war, and left it with the lion’s share of the spoils.22 Similar sentiments recurred in a number of his speeches in the years before the putsch at the end of 1923, without ever becoming a dominant theme.
Nor did America occupy any place of prominence in Hitler’s assessment of future German foreign policy in the second part of his tract, Mein Kampf, which he began in 1924 while interned following the failed putsch and completed in the summer of 1926, more than a year after his release. Only a brief passage towards the end touched on America’s position in world affairs, as a country controlled by Jews, the coming rival and eventual inheritor of the doomed British Empire. ‘It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,’ Hitler wrote. ‘Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions.’ The looming threat was to Great Britain. ‘No ties of kinship can prevent a certain feeling of envious concern in England towards the growth of the American Union in all fields of international, economic and power politics,’ he averred. ‘The former colonial country, child of the great mother, seems to be growing into a new master of the world.’23 The threat to Germany, in Hitler’s warped world-view, of an emerging great power run by Jews, was implicit, but far off in the distant future. He did not embroider upon it.
By 1928, when he composed his ‘Second Book’–mainly a tract related to the question of the South Tyrol, a sensitive issue at the time and probably the reason why this treatise remained unpublished until its discovery long after the war–the prospect of a showdown with the United States at some point in the long-term future had adopted at least shadowy form in Hitler’s mind. Notions of a threat to Europe from the growing economic might of America were as commonplace in Germany at the end of the 1920s as general anti-American prejudice.24 Even so, Hitler’s racist world-view, linked to his assumptions about geopolitics, gave them a different twist.
In the second half of the 1920s, he had become far more preoccupied with geopolitical issues, with the ‘space question’ as he usually called it, than in the years before the putsch. Mainly, this meant providing justification for his view that Germany had to expand to survive, and that the expansion had to come at the cost of the Soviet Union. It meant, too, elaborating upon his view, already expressed in Mein Kampf, that Germany should turn her back on earlier alignments in foreign policy and seek an alliance with Great Britain and Italy. In this thinking, the position of far-off, isolationist America played no part. However, the image we have already cursorily summarized of an emerging economic colossus with the potential to become a great power in the world–and one with a ‘healthy racial core’, but controlled by Jews and Freemasons–now did have a bearing. He came to incorporate that image in his vision of the future status of Germany as a world power, and to envisage its consequences.
He saw these, typically, in racial terms. Impressed (as many were at the time25) by American racially restrictive immigration legislation and propagated ideas on public health and eugenics, Hitler portrayed a young, racially virile white population, representing a selection of the ‘best’ migrants from Europe, in competition with a decadent and declining racial stock of the old continent. ‘The danger arises’, he wrote, ‘that the significance of racially inferior Europe will gradually lead to a new determination of the fate of the world by the people of the North American continent.’ The only way to block this threat was through a racial renaissance in Europe.26 ‘In the future,’ therefore, ‘the only state that will be able to stand up to North America will be the state that has understood how–through the character of its internal life as well as through the substance of its external policy–to raise the racial value of its people and bring it into the most practical national form for this purpose.’ This was the duty laid down for the Nazi movement. The implication was clear. ‘It is thoughtless to believe that the conflict between Europe’–dominated, of course, by a racially purified Germany–‘and America would always be of a peaceful economic nature.’ Eventually, America would turn outwards. The clash with Europe to determine ultimate hegemony could not be avoided.27
Hitler had less to say about the United States during the early 1930s.28 In line with many contemporaries and with the approach taken in the Nazi press, he regarded America as being significantly weakened by the economic crisis set in motion by the Wall Street Crash at the end of October 1929. According to his associate Ernst Hanfstaengl, himself of part-American descent, Hitler remarked that a country beset with its own domestic problems could not hope to play a part in foreign affairs.29 The crisis presumably also shored up his view that free markets and liberal capitalism could not offer the security that national long-term survival required. But, in fact, he said little in public about the Depression in the United States, reserving his rhetorical fire-power for assaults on the failing democratic system at home. And temporary weakness through economic crisis was still compatible with Hitler’s long-term vision of an eventual clash between the United States and Europe, a view he continued to hold into the 1940s.30
No straight line, however, leads from these vague musings about the distant future to later policy decisions about America. Consonant with the scant attention Hitler had paid to the United States during his rise to power, America was little more than a sideshow for him and his government once he had taken office as Reich Chancellor. He displayed no overt interest in the United States during his first years in power, and America scarcely figured in the formulation of foreign policy. Nevertheless, with Hitler’s tacit approval, there was an inexorable decline in relations between Germany and the United States down to the beginning of the European war. Certainly, he did nothing to try to stem this deterioration. Nor could he have done so without reversing the racism and militarism upon which his regime was founded.
Germany’s relations with the United States had been good, and improving, before 1933. This soon changed under the new Nazi regime. Disputes about trade tariffs and Germany’s readiness to renege on repayment of credits owing to the United States formed part of the rapid downturn in goodwill between the two countries. But other issues were more important still. The persecution of the Jews, the first serious outrages already all too evident in the spring of 1933, brought revulsion in the United States and spurred the growth of anti-German feeling. So did the attacks on the Christian Churches, the burning of the books of racially or politically ‘undesirable’ authors and the brutal police terror against political opponents. Beyond the mounting disgust at Nazi barbarism, the strident militarism of Hitler’s regime and the obvious signs, soon apparent, that Germany was starting to rearm (with all the implications that held for the future peace of Europe) were viewed across the Atlantic with increasing foreboding.31
Unsurprisingly, the deterioration in relations also found its echo in German images of the United States. Concerns about foreign trade with the United States, then the staging of the Olympic Games in 1936, meant that German propaganda in the early years of the Nazi regime remained relatively muted in its anti-Americanism, certainly in contrast with its shrill tone in the late 1930s. Even so, criticism of the alleged role of the Jews in the United States was frequent, and gathered in intensity. So, from the mid-1930s onwards, did negative comment about the ‘New Deal’, about American cultural and racial decline and about President Roosevelt himself.32
Th
e growth of antagonism across the Atlantic towards Germany caused Hitler no sleepless nights. If the antipathy was inevitable from a German viewpoint, given the ideological priorities of the Nazi regime, which could not accommodate American liberal sentiment, then it gave few grounds for worry. The United States, after all, was still in the throes of prolonged economic depression; she remained in the grip of isolationism; and her military capability was very low. Hitler could feel confident, therefore, that the United States’ own interests would keep her aloof from European affairs for the foreseeable future. This interpretation was underscored at the very outset of his rule by his Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath. Though Washington could not be expected to support German demands and wishes, suggested Neurath, ‘the lack of interest of the United States in European affairs would probably not alter under President Roosevelt’.33 The reshaping of Europe, Hitler must have been convinced, would remain a matter of little direct American concern. From the perspective of Hitler and the Nazi leadership, the United States, it seemed, could be more or less ignored as a factor in German foreign policy.
Little suggests that Hitler changed his mind in the last years before the war. When, on 5 November 1937, Hitler expounded to his military leaders his ideas about expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and posited a number of differing scenarios about Germany’s involvement in war for ‘living space’ by 1943–5 at the latest, he did not even mention the United States.34 America remained an irrelevance to Hitler the following year as German ambitions became reality, with Austria then the Sudetenland swallowed up by the Reich.
Even so, there was by now more than the occasional straw in the wind to indicate that things were changing. Roosevelt’s ‘quarantine speech’ of 5 October 1937, in which the American President advocated the international isolation of those countries threatening world peace–plainly, Germany, Italy and Japan–was interpreted by the German ambassador in Washington, Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, as an indication that the United States might be moving out of isolationism. Dieckhoff reported in early December that, although for the time being the United States was likely to continue a passive foreign policy, this would cease, despite internal opposition, if her own interests were at stake or she was intolerably provoked, and ‘in a conflict in which the existence of Great Britain is at stake America will put her weight into the scales on the side of the British’.35 The mutual antagonism of the United States and Germany now became ever more apparent. The volume of anti-American propaganda in Germany was turned up sharply, while across the Atlantic mounting detestation for Nazism mingled with growing alarm as Hitler’s aggression took Europe to the verge of war. Revulsion at Nazi barbarism reached a peak in reactions to the horrific nationwide pogroms against the Jews on 9–10 November 1938, the so-called Reichskristallnacht (Reich Crystal Night).36 A tidal wave of outrage swept across America. The American ambassador to Berlin was recalled ‘for report and consultation’ (though, in fact, never to return). Shortly afterwards, in retaliation, the German ambassador in Washington was summoned back to Berlin.37 There was no move to a full breach of diplomatic relations, but the German Foreign Ministry was concerned about the possibility of economic sanctions.38 The concern was justified. The American Treasury backed off at the last minute, on the intervention of Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, from imposing punitive tariffs on German imports.39