On this day in 1941, Adolf Hitler declared that the German Reich was officially at war with the United States. The declaration came four days after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and three days after U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) had declared war on Japan. Germany’s Tripartite Agreement with Japan, coupled with Hitler’s assurance to Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, that Germany would take Japan’s side in any war with the U.S., made the declaration inevitable. While the U.S. had maintained official neutrality concerning the war in Europe, FDR’s support for both the Lend-Lease law, which allowed the United States to lend or lease military supplies to any country considered ‘necessary’ to its national security interests, and the Atlantic Charter, which outlined the wartime goals of both the United States and Great Britain, and the use of American destroyers to defend supply ships bound for England, made clear the U.S.’s opposition to Germany in the War. Declaring war in an 88-minute speech to the Reichstag, Hitler noted these efforts to support the British but also built his declaration around a scathing attack on both FDR and the Jews. “The powers behind Roosevelt were those powers I had fought at home. The Brains Trust was composed of people such as we have fought against in Germany as parasites and removed from public life.” Claiming FDR needed a foreign war to distract the people from the struggling economy, Hitler told the 588 Reichstag members, “The full diabolical meanness of Jewry rallied around this man, and he stretched out his hands.” Hitler’s faith in the non-interventionist, America-First segment of the population led to him underestimating the military resolve of the U.S., a miscalculation that would, inevitably, cost him the Third Reich. As the world would come to see, the U.S.-British-Soviet Alliance would eventually extinguish the threat in Europe, but not before tens of millions had died and most of European Jewry had been eliminated.