Hitler's Fatal Miscalculation: Why Germany Declared War on the United States (Cambridge Military Histories)

Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States has baffled generations of historians. In this revisionist new history of those fateful months, Klaus H. Schmider seeks to uncover the chain of events which would incite the German leader to declare war on the United States in December 1941. He provides new insights not just on the problems afflicting German strategy, foreign policy and war production but, crucially, how they were perceived at the time at the top levels of the Third Reich. Schmider sees the declaration of war on the United States not as an admission of defeat or a gesture of solidarity with Japan, but as an opportunistic gamble by the German leader. This move may have appeared an excellent bet at the time, but would ultimately doom the Third Reich. "In the last days of November 1941, Nazi Germany's strategic situation was ambiguous: her armies were in possession of most of continental Europe and fighting deep inside the USSR, but the momentum of the Wehrmacht's war machine appeared to be spending itself. In relation to the numbers of U-boats available, sinkings had been dropping since June; her surface fleet was unlikely to pick up the slack, since it had just had fuel restrictions imposed on it which all but ruled out a resumption of Atlantic operations. In the air, nighttime RAF bombing raids were becoming a feature of everyday life, and reaching deeper and deeper into areas of the German geography thus far untouched. On the Russian front, which consumed most of the army's and air force's assets, operations aimed at rendering the situation of the defenders of Leningrad and Moscow untenable and force the surrender of those of Sevastopol, were still in progress. On the downside, Army Group South had just been forced to abandon its most recent prize - the city of Rostov - to the counterattacking Red Army, an event that definitely had to be rated as a 'first' in the annals of the Russo- German war. Crucially, the war economy which needed to deliver a maximum output if the armed forces of the Third Reich were to have even a remote chance of meeting the conflicting priorities set by their warlord, had entered a period of crisis, with neither enough labour nor raw materials available to meet the demands for 1942"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half-title page 3 Series page 4 Title page 5 Copyright page 6 Dedication 7 Contents 9 List of Figures 10 List of Maps 11 Preface 12 Acknowledgements 15 List of Abbreviations and German and Russian Terms 17 Introduction 21 1 Hitler’s Pre-War Assessment of the United States and Japan 31 2 Hitler’s Physical Health in Autumn 1941 77 3 ‘All Measures Short of War’: the German Assessment of American Strategy, 1940–1941 90 4 Forging an Unlikely Alliance: Germany and Japan, 1933–1941 183 5 Facing the Same Dilemma: the US and German Quest for Rubber 288 6 The Crisis of the German War Economy, 1940–1941 318 7 The End of Blitzkrieg? Barbarossa and the Impact of Lend-Lease 341 8 The Battle of the Atlantic 447 9 The Luftwaffe on the Eve of Global War 504 10 The Holocaust 543 Conclusion 563 Bibliography 570 Index 599 In this revisionist account, Klaus H. Schmider examines German strategy, foreign policy and war production to uncover the chain of events which would incite Hitler to declare war on the United States - a move which may have appeared an excellent bet at the time, but which would doom the Third Reich.