Examining World History: Why Did Adolf Hitler Declare War on the U.S. in December 1941?
The answer is simple. Adolf Hitler took a huge gamble….and lost. For the first two years of the Second World War, Hitler’s policy toward the U.S. was to hope that isolationism, anti-British sentiment in certain segments of the American public, and internal divisions would keep President Franklin D. Roosevelt too busy to enter the conflict before he had conquered the Soviet Union. He may have believed that FDR, who was clearly a supporter of Great Britain, would lose the 1940 Presidential election to a candidate who would be more accommodating to German hegemony in Europe. Hitler was none too thrilled when the Roosevelt Administration and a bipartisan Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and sent the U.S. Navy to escort convoys as far as Iceland. But even when this led to an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic, the German dictator still held off from declaring war on America. Why? Partly because Hitler suspected that it would take the