The introduction will attempt to give an overview of the existing scholarship on the topic of what can safely be regarded as Hitler’s most idiosyncratic and poorly understood decision: his declaration of war on the USA in December 1941. No monograph exists on the subject: those historians who have engaged with it have done so in the context of articles, general histories of WW 2 and biographies of either Hitler or Roosevelt. It is often described as an impossible-to-fathom irrational decision and this may well be the reason why quite a few authors have decided to omit any mention of it in their books.

Two main schools of thought can be said to exist: the one initiated by Andreas Hillgruber (1925-1989) maintains that the dictator, when faced with the prospect of military defeat in November 1941 chose to declare war on the US as a gesture to mask the fact that he had lost the initiative or indeed was seeking self-immolation. Eberhard Jäckel (1929-2017) and his followers insist that he was hoping to force the US to split its resources between two oceanic theatres. It is my considered opinion that both theories raise more questions than they answer and will propose a new one.