Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

cut off from communications. He was able to return to his headquarters only on 4 December.³⁰⁵ Ribbentrop reached him there and gained approval for what amounted to a new tripartite pact — which the German Foreign Minister rapidly agreed with Ciano — stipulating that should war break out between any one of the partners and the USA, the other two states would immediately regard themselves as also at war with America.³⁰⁶ Already before Pearl Harbor, therefore, Germany had effectively committed itself to war with the USA should Japan — as now seemed inevitable — become involved in hostilities.

The agreement, which had inserted the mutual pledge and not just left a one-sided commitment, was still unsigned when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. This unprovoked Japanese aggression gave Hitler what he wanted without having already committed himself formally to any action from the German side. However, he was keen to have a revised agreement — completed on 11 December, and now stipulating only an obligation not to conclude an armistice or peace treaty with the USA without mutual consent — for propaganda reasons: to include in his big speech to the Reichstag that afternoon.³⁰⁷

The idea of a speech to the Reichstag in mid-December, giving an account of the war-year 1941, had been in Hitler’s mind for some weeks. He had spoken to Goebbels about it as early as 21 November.³⁰⁸ Immediately following Pearl Harbor, he decided to make a declaration of war on the USA the high-point of his long- planned speech. As soon as he heard the news of the Japanese attack, he 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.’³⁰⁹

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 of a positive nature to include in a progress-report to the German people. No further mention had, in fact, been made of a speech to the Reichstag since he had himself originally raised the prospect weeks earlier. With nothing but setbacks and a prolonged war, contrary to all promises, to account for, he would almost certainly have wished to avoid a speech. But now the Japanese attack gave him a positive angle. On 8 December, Ribbentrop told Ambassador Oshima that the Fuhrer was contemplating the best way, from the psychological point of view, of declaring war on the United States.³¹⁰ Since he wanted time to prepare carefully such an important speech, Hitler had the assembling of the Reichstag postponed from 10 December, the date he had originally stipulated, to the next day, despite Japanese pressure for an earlier date.³¹¹ 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.³¹²

On the morning of 9 December, Hitler’s train pulled in at the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin.³¹³ He told Goebbels, who saw him at midday, of his suprise and initial incredulity at the attack on Pearl Harbor, though he had always expected that Japan would be forced to act before long if she did not want to give up her claim to world-power status.³¹⁴ ‘The Fuhrer is beaming again with optimism and confidence in victory,’ Goebbels remarked. ‘It is good, after so many days when we’ve had to digest unpleasant news, to come into direct contact with him again.’³¹⁵ Hitler still had to prepare his speech. He gave Goebbels a resume of what he intended to say.³¹⁶ But when Goebbels saw him again the following lunchtime, 10 December, Hitler had still found no time, he said, to begin work on the speech.³¹⁷

That Germany would declare war on the USA was, as we have seen, a matter of course. No agreement with the Japanese compelled it.³¹⁸ 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.³¹⁹ 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.³²⁰ 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.³²¹ 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 Weizsacker.³²²

Hitler’s speech on the afternoon of Thursday, 11 December, lasted one and a half hours.³²³ It 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. There was some surprise at the figure of 160,000 German dead which Hitler gave; a far higher figure had been presumed.³²⁴ (The figure matched, in fact, those available to the army leadership, though Hitler omitted to mention that total German losses, including wounded and more than 35,000 missing, were by this time over 750,000 men.) ³²⁵ 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.³²⁶ 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 Charge d’Affaires that afternoon, with a formal declaration of war on the USA. He then read out the new agreement, signed that very day, committing Germany, Italy, and Japan to rejecting a unilateral armistice or peace with Britain or the USA.³²⁷

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.³²⁸ 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.³²⁹

Goebbels was, in fact, not blind to the poor state of morale.³³⁰ Hitler, for his part, had the capacity, as always, to convince not only himself, but those in his presence, that things were less bad than they seemed. Not only did he see Japan’s entry into the war as a turning-point. He also continued to convey optimism about the eastern front, despite the depressing situation there. ‘The Fuhrer doesn’t take too tragically the events in the theatre of the eastern campaign,’ Goebbels recorded, after he had spoken to Hitler on 9 December.³³¹ Weather and supplies problems had compelled a need, already present, for a break to build up strength and resources for a spring offensive against the Soviet Union — in the south at the end of April, and in the centre in mid-May. This would be so carefully prepared that it would quickly lead to victory. By then the army would be completely ready, and would not have to tap its last reserves.

Hitler’s ability to put a positive gloss even on a major setback allowed him even to see the onset of the bad weather in the east in the autumn as an advantage. Had the rainy weather not arrived when it did, he said, German troops would have pushed so far forward that the supplies problem could not have been solved. This showed ‘how good fate is to us and how it prevents us through its own intervention from mistakes which without that we would doubtless have made’.³³² He acknowledged how necessary it had been to call off the offensive in order to give time for the exhausted troops to recuperate. And he admitted that there were at present no sufficient weapons to counter the heavy Russian panzers. Where they kept producing them from was a mystery, but ‘currently the most serious concern of the front’. ‘The Bolsheviks,’ he went on, ‘are for the most part comparable with animals; but animals, too, are sometimes unyielding (standhaft), and since the Soviet Union needs take no consideration of its own people, it is in a certain way superior to us.’³³³ But Hitler concluded that the recent setbacks were only temporary ones, and that Germany’s position, especially after the entry of the Japanese into the war, was so favourable that ‘the conclusion of this mighty continental struggle was not in doubt’.³³⁴

The following day, Hitler was at least somewhat more realistic. He conceded that the situation in the east was ‘at the moment not very good’, and 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 the catastrophic lack of winter clothing for the troops, and the effect this was having on morale.³³⁵ Goebbels was well aware from the bitter criticism in countless soldiers’