On December 12, 1941 Hitler was about to address Nazi party leaders in Berlin. The day before, he had declared war on the United States in the German Reichstag. The terrible consequences of this decision would be felt not only by combatants and the civilian population the world over, but especially by European Jews. The Nazi dictator was convinced that the U.S. president, international “plutocratic” capitalism and “world Jewry” were together bent on his destruction. For three years, Hitler had explicitly held European Jewry hostage to secure the good behavior of the Americans. Now he would make good on his threat.
Nearly three years earlier, in January 1939, Hitler had connected the emerging global coalition against him with the “Jewish Question” in a notorious speech to the Reichstag. “The German people,” he said, “must know who the men are who are trying to provoke a war at all costs” and for this reason all propaganda should be focussed on the “Jewish world enemy.” Hitler then issued a coded, but clear, warning to US President Roosevelt and world Jewry: “If Jewish international finance in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples into another war,” Hitler announced, “then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.” Hitler was sending an explicit message, at least in his own mind: European Jews would be held responsible not just for the behavior of “international finance Jewry” in Europe, but also in New York and in Roosevelt’s America generally. The Jews were in effect to be his hostages.
