In the popular recollection of the Second World War, the month of December 1941 is associated almost exclusively with what Roosevelt famously termed “the date that will live in infamy”, namely, the 7th of December, Pearl Harbor. Yet a mere four days later another momentous event took place which would see the war take on a whole new dimension and a truly global scale: on the 11th of December, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States.

Why did he do that? Was he driven, already in late ‘41, by an apocalyptic vision of his role in history? Was the decision, in other words, totally irrational, the result of a dark, brooding, ultimately inexplicable death wish?

Or can the sources of this fateful decision, on the contrary, be located in the German dictator’s understanding of several complex, interrelated spheres – economic, political and military – and in his general sense of how the war was proceeding at the time?

That is the task my guest today set himself in writing Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation: Why Germany Declared War on the United States.

Dr. Klaus Schmider earned his doctorate at the University of Mainz and has been on the staff of the War Studies Department of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurstsince 1999. In 2007, he co-authored Volume 8 of the official German history of the Second World War.