Why did Hitler declare war on America four days after Pearl Harbor, plunging into a conflict with three great powers?
According to HITLER’S AMERICAN GAMBLE: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War, by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, Hitler’s reasons were strategic and ideological.
War with America was inevitable, Hitler assumed, so better to strike first, with hopes of winning the war before full American industrial and military might could deploy against Germany. As early as in 1928, in his unpublished second book, Hitler cited America as the long term threat to Germany that would inevitably have to be confronted.
And Hitler saw America as the ultimate main ideological enemy, even more than the Soviet Union. FDR and his “plutocrats” were the lynchpin of international Jewry, he believed. The Soviets, as subhuman Slavs, must be destroyed so Germany could spread eastward. But American capitalism was Nazi Germany’s most dangerous enemy. The Anglo-Saxons, he thought, were racially kindred but were manipulated by Jewish financiers.
Hitler even delayed his genocide of West European Jews, whom he saw as hostages to America’s choice for war. Once Germany and America were at war, Western Jews would suffer the same destruction as Eastern Jews. They were punished as the purported friends of the American Jews who supposedly drove America to war.
Sadly, there were anti-intervention and isolationist Americans who faulted America’s Jews as a major force pressuring America into war with Germany. America First leader U.S. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, while insisting he wasn’t anti-Semitic, slyly noted that pro-war anti-Nazi Hollywood films were produced by “four names, each that of one of the Jewish faith, each one foreign born.” When Charles Lindbergh faulted American Jews for driving America towards war, Nye defended him, “As Lindbergh said, without being anti-Semitic those of the Jewish faith are contributing to the cause of intervention. Their interest is very natural. If I were one of them, I should feel as they do toward those who have persecuted my people. But I should try not to let my natural hatred blind me to the first and best interests of my own country.”
And, even after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationists like Nye still adamantly opposed war on Germany. On December 7, 1941, Nye addressing an America First anti-war rally when, right before his speech, he was informed that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. He stammered: “I can’t somehow believe this…” And then he delivered his speech as though nothing had happened.
After Pearl Harbor, and until Hitler’s war declaration four days later, America First congressmen like Nye and U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California voted for war with Japan but continued to mobilize against any U.S. war in Europe. Only Hitler himself was able to end the America First movement that had so fiercely opposed any U.S. efforts against the Axis powers.
Hitler’s war declaration speech insisted that FDR “was strengthened in this resolve by the Jews around him. Their Old Testament thirst for revenge thought to see in the U.S.A. an instrument for preparing a second ‘Purim’ for the European nations which were becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. The full diabolical meanness of Jewry rallied round this man, and he stretched out his hands.” He further explained “that the Anglo-Saxon-Jewish-Capitalist World finds itself now in one and the same front with Bolshevism does not surprise us National Socialists: we have always found them in company.”
Of FDR, Hitler further bemoaned: “First he incites war then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack-in the approved manner of an old Freemason.” And, playing the victim, he decried: “The American President and his plutocratic clique have mocked us as the have-nots-that is true, but the have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.”
But FDR, Hitler explained, was not the first American president inspired by Jews to attack Germany. “It is a fact that the two conflicts between Germany and the U.S.A. were inspired by the same force and caused by two men in the U.S.A. – Wilson and Roosevelt,” Hitler said, with the “force” being Jewry. “We know today that a group of interested financiers stood behind Wilson and made use of this paralytic professor because they hoped for increased business. The German people have had to pay for having believed this man with the collapse of their political and economic existence.”
Hitler asked, “Why is there now another President of the U.S.A. who regards it as his only task to intensify anti-German feeling to the pitch of war?” He noted that he and FDR had come to power in the same year, FDR from privilege and wealth, and he from poverty. “When Roosevelt finally stepped on the political stage with all the advantages of his class, I was unknown and fought for the resurrection of my people. When Roosevelt took his place at the head of the U.S.A., he was the candidate of a Capitalist Party which made use of him: when I became Chancellor of the German Reich, I was the Führer of the popular movement I had created. The powers behind Roosevelt were those powers I had fought at home. The Brain Trust [FDR’s advisors] was composed of people such as we have fought against in Germany as parasites and removed from public life.”
Gleefully, Hitler contrasted his own success as ruler in reviving Germany with FDR’s New Deal, which was “actually the biggest failure ever experienced by one man.” So, FDR stoked war fever and hatred towards Germany to divert public opinion. But this diversion would not work. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, German radio announced that Europe was united against “Roosevelt’s Jewish-controlled robber barons.”
For Hitler, the war with America was an expansion of his own war at home against the Jews. He never abandoned this theme. On his last “Political Testament,” written in his bunker shortly before committing suicide, he noted the war was “provoked solely by those international statesman who were either of Jewish origin or who worked for Jewish interests,” with FDR clearly in mind. He made no mention of communism or the Soviets, who were above the bunker, overrunning Berlin.
Hitler of course was justified in hating America. It embodied or aspired to all that he opposed: democracy, capitalism, free speech, human dignity for all. And although America was not controlled by his imagined conspiracy of Jewish financiers, it is built on ultimately Jewish concepts about each person created equally by God.
America in this sense is a Judaic nation whose principles trace to the Hebrew scriptures. For this reason, America will always be despised and feared by dictators and despotisms who want to displace God with their own revelation. Hitler’s “American Gamble” failed. May all the others fail as well.