<P> I can only be grateful to Providence that it entrusted me with the leadership in this historic struggle which, for the next five hundred or a thousand years, will be described as decisive, not only for the history of Germany, but for the whole of Europe and indeed the whole world . </P> <P> Hitler's lack of knowledge about the US and its industrial and demographic capacity for mounting a war on two fronts also entered into his decision . As early as mid-March 1941--nine months before the Japanese attack--President Roosevelt was acutely aware of Hitler's hostility towards the United States, and the destructive potential it presented . Due to this attitude within the White House, and the rapidly progressing efforts of the Americans' industrial capacity before and through 1941 to start providing its armed forces with the ordnance, combat aircraft and ships that would be required to defeat the Axis as a whole, the US was already well on its way towards the full - scale wartime economy which would make it the "arsenal of democracy" for itself and its allies . </P> <P> Finally, Hitler's deeply - held racial prejudices made him see the US as a decadent bourgeois democracy filled with people of mixed race, a population heavily under the influence of Jews and Negroes, with no history of authoritarian discipline to control and direct them, interested only in luxury and living the "good life" while dancing, drinking and enjoying negrofied music . Such a country, in Hitler's mind, would never be willing to make the economic and human sacrifices necessary to threaten National Socialist Germany--and thus set the stage for a dangerously inaccurate view of the very nation that Hitler had stated in his unpublished Zweites Buch (Second Book, 1928) would be the Third Reich's most serious challenge beyond his intended defeat of the Soviet Union . </P> <P> The economic potential and racial composition of America had implications for Hitler ideological construct, indeed, how he saw Germany's current problems and future hopes . His central ideas of' living space' and race held the key to his image of the United States . In the United States' country, with a white' Nordic' racial core, to which he attributed its economic success and standard of living, he saw a model for his vision of German' living space' in Europe . </P>

When did the united states go to war with germany