Silvia's

Why did Herr Adolf Hitler Declare War on the United States of America?



Effects of the First World War

The "Great War" escalated into the global conflict that it became due to entangling treaties of the European countries. Military treaties are pretty basic like alliance. What started out as a political crisis due to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand escalated into armed conflict when the large nations came to the defence of the smaller nations in the Balkans though these alliances.

Military treaties took on a more serious note starting in the early 1800s. The military treaties were created for very specific reasons, intently enforced, and advertised to other nations to an extent seldom seen since 1980. The active solicitation, enforcement, and advertisement of signed treaties are why smaller countries allied themselves with the larger ones: to help guarantee their protection from their neighbours. The smaller countries alliance was done to try and ensure that no neighbouring country would dare attack them since it would bring in a very large country on their side which would then easily defeat the aggressor. However, the Balkan nations animosity toward each other stretched back hundreds of years and when these deep rooted fears, slights, religious differences, were brought to the forefront by the assassination, the worry of escalating into a larger conflict was not considered by these small countries: it was time to enforce the treaties signed over the previous decades.

Thus, when Austria-Hungarian Empire started military action the entangling treaties were honoured by each nation which resulted in every nation but seven in Europe fighting in the Great War.



Fear of War

These new nations to the east and south of Germany had defense treaties with the Western powers. They were explicitly written to ensure that Germany did not invade them else France and Britain, would invade Germany. With the German Weimar Republic restricted to 100,000 troops due to the Treaty of Versailles, and no restriction on the size of the Anglo-French armies, any attack by Germany using these troops would result in the quick military defeat of Germany by a half million man (or larger) force coming from the west.

The scope of the fighting in The Great War (only later referred to as World War One) was immense both in the losses of personnel, plus the monetary cost to pay for it, was a great inhibitor to the western nations. The politicians in charge in France and England (United Kingdom) especially, were very afraid of having another social and economic cost put onto their nations again. Politically they would lose their jobs. This was because many citizens were disillusioned with their leadership in the war, so the politicians in charge strove to avoid direct confrontation with Germany.



Adolf Hitler's Political Mind Set

When Adolf Hitler became the legal Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he immediately began to exploit this fear that the west had of a new war. Herr Hitler (as Winston Churchill often referred to him during the early part of the conflict) was a natural political risk taker, but he was keenly aware of the social fears of the politicians of the western nations about a new war.

Some of Hitler's ideas of what the west would do in a political situation were wishful thinking, some were confirmed based on the initial treaty violation gambles that the Hitler (legally Germany was still a Republic, but operationally it was a dictatorship) violated which were won. These initial political ploys, and the resulting successes, reinforced his initial mind set of the political will of the west so that in Herr Hitler's mental mind it became a fact as to what the west would always do in a future political or military crisis.