Was the Third Reich angry about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor because it led to United States involvement in WWII?

by [deleted]

Basically what the title says, my question concerns the reaction(s) of Hitler’s government. Did anyone in the German government express anger or frustration because of the actions made by their Japanese allies? Prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States was not directly involved in the fighting. This preemptive attack was designed to neutralize the U.S. naval forces, would it logically follow then that Germany would express consternation for committing a largely unprovoked attack against the United States?

Robert_B_Marks

Considering that Hitler was pushing for Japan to go to war against the United States beforehand, the Reich was decidedly okay with it.

Important thing to keep in mind about Adolf Hitler: he was always planning to invade and conquer the United States. What he was trying to do was not to keep the United States out of the war completely, but to keep them out of the war until Hitler had conquered Russia and Britain, and had a sufficiently strong navy to cross the Atlantic and take on America (basically, war against the world, but one nation at a time).

The biggest problem was the lack of a surface fleet that could take on the United States Navy (and this was what his Plan Z was all about). Japan, however, HAD a large and modern surface fleet that could do the job. So, Hitler's thinking was that if Japan went to war against the United States, the Japanese fleet would take care of the US Navy, and Nazi Germany could safely declare war without worrying about the naval side of the equation (which the war in Europe had scuppered anyway).

And if this seems rather ambitious of Nazi Germany, the missing piece to the puzzle is that Hitler was a dedicated believer in the "stabbed in the back" conspiracy theory - the idea that Germany's war effort had collapsed not because of the exhaustion of the war, or because of the overpowering force now coming from the United States, but because Germany had been stabbed in the back on the home front. He didn't believe that the United States had any impact whatsoever on the loss of the Great War, and considered America to be a paper tiger, made weak by its racially mixed population and democratic system. He literally did not think the United States could contribute anything of value to a war against Germany.

(For more information, I cannot recommend Gerhard Weinberg's A World At Arms strongly enough - it really gives you an understanding of the policy decisions involved, and they get fairly delusional...and very evil.)