This could in any case be militarily ruled out for the foreseeable future. And the prominent strain of isolationism in the country and in Congress posed an obstacle to intervention. A shift to belligerency, it was reckoned, could not take place before the US presidential election that was due in November 1940. The key concern was to keep the USA out of the European conflict until Germany had won it. This meant thinking strategically, not just ideologically, about America. But the intensification of the Atlantic War and American strategic plans meant that a US declaration could almost certainly not have been long delayed, even had Hitler not preempted it. Possibly Roosevelt could in the short term have avoided a formal declaration against Germany. The war could not, therefore, have been confined to the Pacific. Escalation of the war in the Atlantic was inevitable.īeyond this, the Victory Program was predicated upon sending a major land force to fight in Europe. Confronting the threat from Germany had always been seen as the priority by the US administration.
#Hitler speech full#
They knew that a German declaration of war was imminent.Įven without the German move, however, full American involvement in the European war would have been likely in the near future. They were reading Japanese intelligence signals and were aware of the agreement between Germany and Japan. Immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack, the President and his advisers deliberated whether to declare war on Germany, a move which would undoubtedly have faced serious opposition in Congress. By this time the Nazi leadership saw America as a potential future enemy, lined up on Britain’s side, in a war that was looming.īy declaring war on the USA on 11 December 1941, Hitler spared Roosevelt a tricky decision. That was followed by a ferocious verbal assault on US President Roosevelt by Hitler in a Reichstag speech three months later. This was part of the background to Hitler’s notorious “prophecy” on 30 January 1939 that, in the event of another war caused, as he saw it, by Jewish finance, the Jews would be destroyed. How did the Nazi party rise to power in Germany in 1933? And what were Hitler’s motivations?.But the outrage in the USA about the terrible pogroms in November that year sharpened the antagonism towards Germany, at the same time intensifying Hitler’s paranoia about the power of Jewish warmongers in America. America remained largely an irrelevance to Hitler during 1938, as Germany swallowed up Austria, then the Sudetenland. Hitler did not mention the USA when he laid out his strategic imperatives to his military commanders in November 1937. In the early period of Nazi rule, America scarcely figured in the formulation of foreign policy.
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(Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann/ullstein bild via Getty Images) Adolf Hitler delivers a speech to the Reichstag in Berlin after declaring war on the USA.