Did Hitler have any plans to invade the US?

Factual Questions
1

Once Hitler’s army were bogged down both on the western and eastern fronts it seemed clear (in hindsight) that his ambitions were doomed. Even Japan directly attacking the US couldn’t change the course of the war once the Allies landed in France and started pushing eastward towards Berlin.

My question is did the German Hierarchy ever plan to attack either North or South America? At one point they were entrenched in Africa and they almost took Russia, but given the geographic isolation of the Americas I find it hard to believe Hitler thought he could take out the US at the same time. My guess is that he assumed the US would stay neutral or that Japan would end up wining the war for the Pacific.

Were there any concrete plans to invade the Western Hemisphere?

2

Recently I read Losing The War by Lee Sandlin. You can find it in its entirety on This American Life’s website. It first appeared in an exceptional publication known as The Chicago Reader. An excerpt was read during a segment of TAL, and Ira Glass, the host, mentioned that the article was extensively researched, along with that, its appearance in The Chicago Reader gives me no reason to doubt its accuracy. If I remember the article correctly, Sandlin wrote that even Hitler knew that an attack on North America was at least 100 years away … and looking at the article, I found the section:

It’s a great article overall; very well written and informative. It’s a bit long just reading it on a computer screen, but I really liked it.

3

In contrast with contingency plans commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II prior to World War I, I don’t believe Nazi Germany ever seriously explored such a possiblity.

As Dignan notes, Hitler saw direct conflict with the US as something on the very distant horizon, and likely beyond his own lifetime (which he anticipated would be short). His chief geopolitical objective through most of his career was German domination of continental Europe, which he considered to be the Aryan race’s immediate right and destiny. Conquest of Great Britain didn’t even really fit into his plans, such that his peace overtures to Britain after the fall of France specified that Britain could keep all its overseas possessions (though Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean soon complicated things). As the Germans successes compounded, Hitler’s horizons seemed to expand a bit – correspondence and discussion within the German heirarchy apparently referenced a return to Germany’s pre-World War I African colonies, and a central Asian demarcation line between Germany and Japan’s spheres of influence was anticipated. The western hemisphere remained pretty much off Hitler’s radar, though, except politically.

Hitler’s main objective with regard to the US was simply keeping us out of the war. He recognized that our intervention in World War I had been decisive. He considered the increasing US support for Britain to be the work of the ever-popular “international Jewish conspiracy”, and authorized the “Final Solution” (systematic extermination of European Jews, rather than simply seizure of property, brutal imprisonment, and sporadic murder) partly as an act of revenge against the “conspiracy” once Germany and the US were formally at war. Though Germany issued the formal declaration after Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s aims in doing so were political (maintaining the “initiative”) and tactical (launching a submarine offensive in hopes of disrupting supplies to Britain), rather than in contemplation of any actual seizure of American territory.

Of course, just because Hitler didn’t plan an invasion doesn’t mean we didn’t think he was at the time. I recall seeing a Life magazine spread, I think from 1940 or '41, predating Pearl Harbor, in which possible German invasion plans were laid out. They theorized that Germany would subvert governments in South American and the Carribean (Argentina, and to a lesser extent Brazil until it joined the Allies in 1944 or '45, had sympathies with the Nazis), and would build up forces there. Captured naval assets of France, and possibly Britain, would also support the Nazi invasion. All of this, of course, was idle speculation, possibly fed by US contingency plans from between the wars. Remember that the War Department had gamed possible wars with Japan and Britain (!) during the '20s, and had some idea of where foreign invaders might choose to land.

Similarly, our own fears to the contrary, Japan’s ambition was hegemony over Asia. It didn’t even plan to extend its island possessions in the Pacific until the Doolittle raid inspired them to expand their defensive perimeter by taking Midway island.

4

Invading the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies doesn’t count?

5

In fact, the US seized the Philippines partially to prevent the Germans from doing so. Admiral Dewey actually threatened a German naval captain with war.
As for Hitler, his main interest was the invasion, capture, and (eventual) colonization of Russia. That wouldhave been enough for him…anything else was a side show!

6

I was considering those to be part of “Asia”, and thinking of “Pacific islands” as being limited to all the small islands east of Japan with minimal resources that were of interest to Japan primarily due to their strategic location, e.g., Wake Island, Guam, the Solomons, etc. I apologize for being unclear.

7

There were rumors of pressure on Cárdenas to allow German warships to dock in Mexico–and the promise of the return of Mexican territory lost to the U.S. in 1848, in the event of German victory over the States. Also, Mexico did supply Germany and Japan with oil in the late 1930s and maintained official neutrality. Josephus Daniels was able to avert major problems with Cárdenas following the oil industry expropriation, and after Cárdenas’s finally said no to Germany, Hitler is said to have observed, “Mexico would be so much nicer, if it didn’t have all those Mexicans.” Or something like that.

Following the Cárdenas presidency there was a fairly strong fascist movement against incoming pres. Avila Camacho. After the U.S. recognized Avila Camacho’s presidency, the Falange sent agents to rouse fascists and subvert the new government. Roosevelt sent Sumner Wells to resolve most outstanding issues in U.S.-Mexican relations with the new government. Some cites say Mexican raw materials were used in 40% of U.S. war industry output, and the Bracero program was a major factor in replacing soldiers in domestic U.S. industry. There were U.S. military training facilities in Mexico too, at that time.

General Mexican opinion was anti-U.S. because of Bracero mistreatment and resentment of U.S. influence on the Avila Camacho government. U.S. had secret agents in most Mexican ports–there was evidence of Italian spies in Mexico trying to coordinate an attack on aircraft in San Diego, as well as the Spanish saboteurs. Mexico didn’t declare war on Germany until U-boats sunk two Mexican oil tankers in 1942.

There was a Mexican air corps that flew with the USAAF Pacific ops and five of its pilots were KIA.

Sorry… that’s more of an abridged general Mexico in WWII answer more than anything. But history books somehow determine that Mexico was strategically unimportant in the war, with which assessment I disagree.

8

Thanks, El Mariachi Loco, for elaborating on one reason for concerns at the time about German subversion of Latin America.

The Life magazine issue I mentioned was apparently the June 24, 1940 issue. I haven’t found the article on-line, but there’s always the possibility of a visit to an “analog” library.

9

I read somewhere that the Soviets considered it twice, discussed it at least. The generals advised against it, because we had 100 million armed citizens.

If Hitler ever considered invading, his generals would have come to the same conclusion. He did consider bombing us(and had plans for long range bombers), as did the soviets, but neither country had an army large enough to occupy any country with so many armed citizens.

10

blinks

Today’s proverb: “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

11

Give me a break. The Soviets did no such thing. Pre-WWII they had their own problems to deal with for most of the time, moreover they didn’t have the bombers or the navy to even begin to consider invading the US.

Post-WWII, the bomb pretty much took care of any serious plans to attack the US.

Hitler’s generals would never have even needed to consider the populace of the US, since they didn’t have the infrastructure to invade either. The US Navy would have stopped them cold before they could even think of mounting a trans-Atlantic invasion.

Stop posting urban legends.

12

The Kaiser may have considered war with the US (over various colonial possessions and possibly a Venezuelan crisis), but I very much doubt that the German Empire ever seriously considered an invasion of the US, even if they could magically get troops to Mexico. For most of the pre-WWI and WWI period the German foreign ministers had little knowledge or understanding of the US (the exception should have been Zimmerman, who sent the poorly conceived telegram to Mexico)

Hitler never thought much of the US at all. His philosophy and historical views required it to be a negligible quantity (both because of its ‘mongrel’ nature and because otherwise the stabbed in the back theory didn’t make much sense).

The Japanese had both limited ambitions and some concept of the strategic realities involved. They knew that a long war was a losing war (same as with the Russo-Japanese war). Given that the Pearl Harbor raid and Midway invasion force had strained Japan’s logistical abilities to the limit it is unlikely that anyone in the Imperial Japanese Navy would have given any invasion plan serious consideration.

13

I don’t know if it was actually part of Hitler’s plans or just a pipedream on the part of the designers, but I have seen copies of a German map showing the proper placement for an atomic bomb in NYC to achieve maximum casualties.

14

Expanding on my earlier answer, Susanann, I don’t see any circumstances in which private gun ownership - wedded to the idea though you are - gets to be a factor to any useful extent. For the question to be relevant in the first place we have to assume a sizeable Nazi armed force arriving in the USA, which is hard enough to wish up even as a thought-experiment. Perhaps we can assume the Amerika bomber becomes a viable proposition, the Amis don’t get the Bomb and the Nazis do, and they successfully force the States to sue for peace and stand down its armed forces.

Once the Nazis arrive in force, we can be sure that eliminating private gun ownership is high on their list of concerns. The point is that this is by no means unachievable. The French made the mistake in 1940 of trying to fight the War of 1914 all over again; it would be foolish to assume that American elements, absent their conventional armed forces, would be able to fight the War of 1776 all over again.

American revolutionaries were blessed with firearms at least the equal of anything the British could bring against them, and were able to profit from tactics that weren’t up to prosecuting the mother country’s aims. Translate it to the mid 1940s though and the picture changes thoroughly. The best handguns available to the American private gun owner, with the occasional rifle and even more occasional Chicago piano, don’t stack up against professional riflemen with plenty of full-calibre machine-guns, heavy weapons support, and ample experience of front-line combat.

It’s been emphasised elsewhere on these boards that privately-held guns, even in the hands of enthusiasts with plenty of target practise, are by no means a given for personal defence against even an armed criminal: The amateur marksman, unused to shooting for blood, sees his accuracy go through the floor. How much the worse when the amateur must slug it out with battle-hardened troops. And this assumes that the Wehrmacht will be obliging enough to blunder into small-arms range. If they’re smart, they let the artillery do the talking from five miles away, or the machineguns from six hundred yards.

Having a hundred million privately held guns is all well and good if you can count on a hundred million wielders being willing to sell their lives one at a time. One brave Ami with a gun taking one Nazi at the cost of his own life represents an unsustainable rate of attrition for the occupying force if it‘s repeated a millionfold. But grant the occupiers enough sense to use a carrot and stick approach: A tolerable occupation with reasonable freedom and privileges for those who toe the line, and perhaps a partition of the country after the manner of France. In the Occupied Zone, the Germans enforce martial law. Elsewhere - perhaps south of the Mason-Dixon line - there is a friendly American government. That leaves the Americans with a lot to lose if they cut up rough. Meanwhile, the occupiers come down hard, with overwhelming military force, on any pockets of resistance. They are no strangers to enforcing vicious reprisals.

Given the right approach, the Amis might be able to make the States ungovernable; but to make a Stalingrad of every city in America would require a willingness on the part of the people to suffer Stalingrad-type hardship. The question is whether the will would be there.

For my money it was Uncle Sam’s immense logistical superiority, the ability to feed, arm and supply a large armed force from a massive impregnable industrial base, and the sheer unbridgeability of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, that made invading the States utterly unviable. Private gun ownership didn’t register as a blip on the scale.

15

Excellent post, *Umbriel, and one that parallels my thinking (except for the bit about the Holocaust–I’d like to see a cite).

But why do so many Americans still believe that we came very close to “losing our freedom” in WWII. That has got to be the greatest myth of the the 20th century.

16

Because we’re basically taught that we won the war single-handedly and the British helped a bit. We only get a rudimentary education to begin with (“Memorize these 10 battles by Tuesday”) and are probably not going to cover tactics and strategies enough to debate the whys and wherefores of invading the U.S. We spent about a week on World War II in one of my H.S. history classes, for example.

Personally, I just look at all the difficulties we had with Normandy and we had a staging area about 90 miles away. Trying to project those problems onto a German-Japanese invasion that’d cross hundreds of miles of open ocean may be futile, but the task would be…well, if not impossible, it’d be a while in the preparing, and in all that time we’d be training the military, building planes, and setting up defenses. Frankly, if Britian got forced out of the war, I imagine we’d have sued for peace and called it a day in short order.

17

I’m apparently in opposition to most of the posts here, but I have read of evidence that Hitler was contemplating an invasion of the United States at some point in the not too distant future. Granted, Hitler tended to make up his plans off the cuff, so it’s hard to say how serious he was. However, the Nazis were working on long-range missiles and bombers which they classified as being “trans-Atlantic” in range, they were pressing neutral countries for occupation rights to Atlantic Islands which would hold little strategic value except as naval bases against the United States, and they were attempting to built up a military intelligence network in the US. All of these plans incidentally preceded 1941. Now it could be argued that these were defensive plans to thwart the threat of an American attack, but let’s face facts, Hitler was a prime believer in the theory that the best defense is a good offense. My guess is that if Britain and Russia had surrendered by 1942, there would have been an Axis invasion of North America by 1950.

18

Because up to 1942 Germany had overrun France, Eastern Europe, and North Africa, and was knocking on the door in Egypt and Russia. London was being bombed. Japan was in China, the Phillipines, the pacific islands, and indochina. They were very near to India and Australia. Italy - well she had Ethiopa - but every little bit counts.

Certainly not the most cheerful picture.

19

Yes, Adirondack_mike but we never stopped believing that after 60 years of access to the historical truth.

Yes, Little Nemo, the Nazis developed plans to strike at the US, but this was after the US entered the war. The idea was to inflict enough pain on the US to get us to drop out of the war, as well as to retaliate against US boming raids on Germany.

No cite, but it’s long been my understanding that Hitler envisioned the World being divided up among a “Big Five” thusly: Germany would dominate continental Europe to the Urals; Japan would dominate East Asia, Italy would dominate the Mediterranean region, Britain would keep her empire in India and Southern Africa (precise demarcations being unclear) and the US would dominate the Western Hemisphere. Just so long as we stay on our own side of either ocean.

20

I don’t quite follow - Yes we eventually won but in the beginning it was not the most obvious outcome. You can say what you want in hindsight, but I bet there were a lot of nervous people until the middle of 1944 (not withstanding the happenings on the eastern front).

You may want to google “America First”. I know nothing about this except for the political cartoons in “Dr. Seuss Goes To War.” They did not want the US involved in the European war. From what I can gather they believed that the Germany was not interested in the western hemisphere.

To a point. If the axis had won - without the US becoming involved - what conditions would they have put on us? They would control resources and markets and therefore make demands on us to play in their game. Would that mean losing our freedom? I would let the examples that the axis left in conquered territories to answer that question.