Hitler

his big speech to the Reichstag that afternoon.
    As soon as he had heard the news of the Japanese attack, Hitler had telephoned Goebbels, expressing his delight, and ordering the summoning of the Reichstag for Wednesday, 10 December, ‘to make the German stance clear’. Goebbels commented: ‘We will, on the basis of the Tripartite Pact, probably not avoid a declaration of war on the United States. But that’s now not so bad. We’re now to a certain extent protected on the flanks. The United States will no longer be so rashly able to provide England with aircraft, weapons, and transport-space, since it can be presumed that they will need all that for their own war with Japan.’
    From a propaganda point of view, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was most timely for Hitler. Given the crisis on the eastern front, he had little favourable to include in a progress report to the German people. But now the Japanese attack gave him a positive angle. On 8 December, Ribbentrop told Ambassador Oshima that the Führer was contemplating the best way, from the psychological point of view, of declaring war on the United States. Since he wanted time to prepare carefully such an important speech, Hitler had the assembling of the Reichstag postponed by a day, to 11 December. At least, Goebbels remarked, the time of the speech, three o’clock in the afternoon, though scarcely good for the German public, would allow the Japanese and Americans to hear it.
    That Germany
would
declare war on the USA was a matter of course. No agreement with the Japanese compelled it. But Hitler did not hesitate.A formal declaration might have to wait until the Reichstag could be summoned. But at the earliest opportunity, on the night of 8–9 December, he had already given the order to U-boats to sink American ships. A formal declaration of war was necessary to ensure as far as possible – in accordance with the agreement of 11 December – that Japan would remain in the war. And it was also important, from Hitler’s point of view, to retain the initiative, and not let this pass to the United States. Certain, as he had been for many months, that Roosevelt was just looking for the chance to intervene in the European conflict, Hitler thought that his declaration was merely anticipating the inevitable and, in any case, formalizing what was in effect already the situation. Not least, for the German public, it was important to demonstrate that he still controlled events. To await a certain declaration of war from America would, from Hitler’s standpoint, have been a sign of weakness. Prestige and propaganda, as always, were never far from the centre of Hitler’s considerations. ‘A great power doesn’t let itself have war declared on it, it declares war itself,’ Ribbentrop – doubtless echoing Hitler’s sentiments – told Weizsäcker.
    Hitler’s speech on the afternoon of Thursday, 11 December, was not one of his best. The first half consisted of no more than the lengthy, triumphalist report on the progress of the war which Hitler had intended to provide long before the events of Pearl Harbor. The rest of the speech was largely taken up with a long-drawn-out, sustained attack on Roosevelt. Hitler built up the image of a President, backed by the ‘entire satanic insidiousness’ of the Jews, set on war and the destruction of Germany. Eventually he came to the climax of his speech: the provocations – up to now unanswered – had finally forced Germany and Italy to act. He read out a version of the statement he had had given to the American Chargé d’Affaires that afternoon, with a formal declaration of war on the USA. He then announced the new agreement, signed that very day, committing Germany, Italy, and Japan to rejecting a unilateral armistice or peace with Britain or the USA.
    In Goebbels’s view, Hitler’s speech had had a ‘fantastic’ effect on the German people, to whom the declaration of war had come neither as a surprise, nor a shock. In reality, the speech had been able to do little to raise morale, which, given the certain extension of the war into the indefinite future, and now the opening of aggression against a further powerful adversary, had sunk to its lowest point since the conflict began.
    Hitler agreed with Goebbels’s wishes to prepare the people for unavoidable setbacks through propaganda more attuned to the realism of the harshness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. Hitler and Goebbels evidently discussed