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It also ought to be noted that Germany declared war on the United States; had Hitler not done so, it would have been very difficult to convince Congress to expand the American role in the war beyond the Pacific theater.
I am actually stunned to this day that Hitler, who was an evil but eerily intelligent person, would think declaring war on the United States would be in his best interest when at the same time, preparing to go into Soviet Russia. Of course I am thankful as can be that he took this course of action, but from Hitler's standpoint I don't know what he was thinking.
You declare war on the US and then you channel the largest tank army in the world away from the west. So that while you are pre-occupied with a Russian struggle you can expect to be slammed by a fleet from the Atlantic?
A more logical course of action, thank goodness this wasn't inplemented, would be that Hitler calm things down with Britain, maybe even forge a truce with Britain and the U.S. And then advocate a very anti-communist platform to create more of rift between US/Britain and the Soviets.
Then go into Russia and Germany to pretend to condemn the Pearl Harbor attack as a mistake. And have Japan meet with Hitler with a promise to continue their offensives once Russia capitulates
That would make more sense. One front at a time. US would have then put all their fleet on the Pacific, probably would have lost more soldiers to Japan.... The Russia invasion wouldn't be disrupted by the Normandy invasion and the weather would warm and Germany would have made progress on defeating Stalin.
After this, Japan would proceed violently at the US and a catastrophic German war machine with all the oil of Russia would defeat Britain.... You would be looking at the German takeover of the planet
And Once Germany and Japan had the world in their hands, Germany would finish off Italy, then be the one to build the atomic bomb that would be used by Germany against Japan as the final straw.
Nazis would have the planet as theirs and would ultimately weaken from within, with no more scapegoats and no more pillages to cheat their way up with. Hitler would die eventually and the power structure would weaken. New civil wars would emerge everywhere. Whole regions of the world would be depopulated. Ethnic groups that prevailed would fight back and a new generation of Nazis would emerge similarly to today's United Kingdom. They would shame their own forefathers.
See it's extremely difficult to conquer the world. It's then 10,000 times harder to maintain that status...the thousand year goal would never have succeeded
Last edited by Ericthebean; 09-30-2014 at 11:40 AM..
I am actually stunned to this day that Hitler, who was an evil but eerily intelligent person, would think declaring war on the United States would be in his best interest when at the same time, preparing to go into Soviet Russia. Of course I am thankful as can be that he took this course of action, but from Hitler's standpoint I don't know what he was thinking.
Germany was not preparing to go into the USSR in December 1941 - it had already done so six months earlier. Hitler and his generals thought they would finish off the Soviets in the summer of 1942. They were wrong, of course, but it was an operation that was largely seen as complete.
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You declare war on the US and then you channel the largest tank army in the world away from the west. So that while you are pre-occupied with a Russian struggle you can expect to be slammed by a fleet from the Atlantic?
Given the assumption that the Soviets would be finished off in 1942, there was no logical reason for Hitler to worry about the U.S. in the near term. They obviously weren't going to be invading anytime soon, after all. While Hitler absolutely underestimated the ability of the U.S. to carry the war to Europe, his declaration did not have much immediate impact on the Eastern Front.
Anyway, in the near term it also served Hitler's purposes to be able to unleash his u-boats on American shipping to series effect, as he did in the first half of 1942.
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A more logical course of action, thank goodness this wasn't inplemented, would be that Hitler calm things down with Britain, maybe even forge a truce with Britain and the U.S. And then advocate a very anti-communist platform to create more of rift between US/Britain and the Soviets.
After Dunkirk, Hitler wanted to do precisely that. The British weren't going for it - not surprisingly, they didn't see a situation in which Germany having free hand in the west as being a good deal for the UK.
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Then go into Russia and Germany to pretend to condemn the Pearl Harbor attack as a mistake. And have Japan meet with Hitler with a promise to continue their offensives once Russia capitulates
That would make more sense. One front at a time. US would have then put all their fleet on the Pacific, probably would have lost more soldiers to Japan.... The Russia invasion wouldn't be disrupted by the Normandy invasion and the weather would warm and Germany would have made progress on defeating Stalin.
Barbarossa was not disrupted by Overlord. By June 1944, the Soviets had long since stopped the German advance and were on the offensive.
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After this, Japan would proceed violently at the US and a catastrophic German war machine with all the oil of Russia would defeat Britain.... You would be looking at the German takeover of the planet
Assuming the U.S. ignored Europe (and there is precisely zero historical reason to think this would have happened), the U.S. would have been able to prosecute the Pacific war all the much more intensely. Yet you imagine the Japanese as then proceeding 'violently' at the U.S.?
And we still have deployable nuclear weapons by the summer of 1945, while Germany's nuclear programs was, to put it charitably, years behind. But you think Germany is taking over the planet? This is the same Germany that couldn't force the UK to come to terms and that couldn't take down the Soviets before the U.S. entered the war (and don't tell me about Lend Lease, because that was being delivered before the U.S. entered the war, and so was not contingent upon the U.S. being a formal belligerent).
Meanwhile, you've both improved the British situation (by imagining a cease-fire wih Germany in 1941) while simultansously imagining that Germany defeats the UK - I guess Germany just magically gets a Kriegsmarine on par with the Royal Navy, and a Luftwaffe that is much stronger than the one that failed to defeat the RAF in 1940, not to mention develops an amphibious ability that it took the combined might of the U.S., UK and Canada to assemble in 1944?
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And Once Germany and Japan had the world in their hands, Germany would finish off Italy, then be the one to build the atomic bomb that would be used by Germany against Japan as the final straw.
The US let Hitler kill the Jews for 10 years ? Are you joking ?? Did you forget about France , Britian , the USSR and a few other European countries fighting the Germans way before the US did ? Did they let Hitler kill the Jews also ? I dont think anyone or country LET Hitler kill the Jews ? Ron
LOL. I think this has already been dismissed as a nonsense thread. Posters here have turned this into a general WW2 topic thread it looks like. Which is OK I guess (although most of it has been discussed in this forum ad nauseam in other threads) but I do wish they would put there comments into a separate WW2 topic title that is not so stupid, and let this thread die the death it deserves.
The US let Hitler kill Jews for 10 years, and did almost nothing. The US got involved when Hitler invaded France. Did the US really worry about the Jews?
Many American Jews didn't even care about the Holocaust and were divided in opinion on it since they were just living their lives in the USA oblivious to the plight of Holocaust of European Jews in Europe
That is very inaccurate. The "Final Solution" was just the final stages of the Holocausts. Jews were being persecuted long before 1942. The Nazi regime started almost the minute they got into power in 1933. They started gradually by restricting Jewish citizens' rights. Then the government actively encouraged the looting and burning of Jewish businesses and homes. By the time of the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, the Germans marched into Austria and immediately began the process of rounding up Austrian Jews. Jews were being forcibly relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. The Holocausts were in full swing by then.
I have heard stories that Hitler originally considered deporting the Jews, but nobody including the U.S. would take them. So Hitler then began the process of genocide. I don't know how true this is.
You are correct on all counts, but nevertheless the common perception is different. When people say "Holocaust" they are generally thinking of extermination camps, not looting stores.
I have heard stories that Hitler originally considered deporting the Jews, but nobody including the U.S. would take them. So Hitler then began the process of genocide. I don't know how true this is.
For German Jews, he didn't deport them. He (via the Nazi regime) paid some of them to leave. Since most of the German Jews saw themselves primarily as Germans and secondarily as Jews, most didn't leave. The ones that took the money and left where the ones on the bottom of the financial scale. His next attempt was to make their lives miserable so they would want to leave. Those two alone accounted for about 300,000 leaving Germany (problem is that many left to countries that were later taken over by the Nazis, rounded up and sent to the camps where most died). The last 200,000 still in Germany mostly ended up in the Ghettos/Camps. By the end of the war around 5% of the Jewish population of Germany survived (8% for all of Europe).
To be fair, the United States officially got "involved" (as the OP wrote) prior to Pearl Harbor.
The Destroyers for Bases Agreement in which we sent 50 mothballed destroyers the British and Canadian Royal Navys in September '40, in exchange for naval base rights in Canada, the West Indies and other places (plus followed by another ten newer Coast Guard cutters in '41).
Then, the U.S. passed the Lend-Lease Act in March of '41, which ramped up some $50billion (1941 billion, about $550 billion today) of war aid to GB, USSR, France and other Allies.
The USA did other things of a warlike nature before Dec, 7th 1941 such as the occupation of Greeland, Iceland and the Azores to prevent them from being used as German bases since planes from Greenland could attack the NE USA and Canadian Martimes. We also got British and Canadian approval to build the Alcan (Alaska Highway) to provide an overland route to Alaska to improve our defense of this far flung American outpost.
To relieve pressure on the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy and counter German Wolf packs the USN began convoy escorts from North American waters to Iceland where British forces took charge of convoy escorts. By Pearl Harbor several hundred USN personnel had died in hostile action with German U-boats which claimed at least 4 Navy destroyers and not to mention hundreds of US merchant ships and their civilian crews The Battle of the Atlantic was underway before Dec 7 1941.
Lastly, The British sent Prof Tizard (Churchill's Science Advisor) to America in the summer of 1941 with a number of British technical secrets among which were the cavity magnetron the key to portable radar on ships and aircraft, the designs for the Whittle Jet turbine engine and the Merlin engine, and the M.A.U.D report which was a British Admiralty study on the feasibility of building a Fission bomb using enriched uranium 235, Britain wanted the US to use its industrial might unfettered by German bombing to make all these advanced weapons in bulk so they could become a factor in defeating Germany and Japan, America was also clued in on Enigma Coding device (Given to the British by the Polish forces who fled to Britain after the fall of Warsaw) and Bletchley Park.
The final impetus for the U.S. entry into the war was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Germany's declaration of war three days later.
^
This appears to be correct.
Also, it is worth noting that if the U.S. cared that much about European Jews, then it would have allowed more European Jews to immigrate to the U.S. during this time; in reality, the U.S. did not allow that many European Jews to immigrate to the U.S. in the 1930s and early 1940s, even forcing the passengers on the MS St. Louis to travel back to Europe despite the fact that this ship contained hundreds of European Jewish refugees. This is another reason as to why I am extremely skeptical that Nazi Germany's vehement anti-Semitism was a factor (especially a significant factor) in the U.S.'s entry into World War II.
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