What Germany's Leader Said The Day Japan Hit Pearl Harbor

On December 7th, 1941, as Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler was half a world away, buried in grim reports from the Russian front at his headquarters in the forests of East Prussia. He had no advance warning of the attack, and under the terms of his 1940 alliance with Japan, Germany was under no obligation to join a war Tokyo had started. What Hitler did over the next four days has been argued over for more than eighty years. The German advance on Moscow had already stalled, a Soviet counteroffensive was throwing his armies back, and taking on the world's largest economy made no military sense at all. And yet, from the moment the news reached him, the men around Hitler saw something in his reaction they never forgot. This is the full story of how Hitler responded to Pearl Harbor, and the decision that followed.