10 Dec.
45
The same day, 11 December, the fourth anniversary of
which is tomorrow, the Congress of the United States resolved:
"That the state of war between the
United States and the Government of Germany which has thus been thrust
upon the United States, is hereby formally declared."
This declaration is contained as Document 272 in the official
publication Peace and War, of which the Tribunal has already
taken judicial notice as Exhibit USA-122. The declaration itself has
been reproduced for the document books as our Document 2945-PS.
It thus appears that, apart from their own aggressive intentions and
declaration of war against the United States, the Nazi conspirators in
their collaboration with Japan incited and kept in motion a force
reasonably calculated to result in an attack on the United States. While
maintaining their preference that the United States not be involved in
war at the time, they nevertheless foresaw the distinct possibility,
even probability, of such involvement as a result of the action they
were encouraging. They were aware that the Japanese had prepared plans
for attack against the United States, and they accepted the consequences
by assuring the Japanese that they would declare war on the United
States should a United States-Japanese conflict result.
In dealing with captured documents of the enemy the completeness of the
plan is necessarily obscured, but those documents which have been
discovered and offered in evidence before this Tribunal show that the
Japanese attack was the proximate and foreseeable consequence of their
collaboration policy and that their exhortations and encouragement of
the Japanese as surely led to Pearl Harbor as though Pearl Harbor itself
had been mentioned.
I should like to read the Ciano diary entry for 8 December, the day
after Pearl Harbor:
"A night telephone call from
Ribbentrop. He is overjoyed about the Japanese attack on America. He
is so happy about it that I am happy with him, though I am not too
sure about the final advantages of what has happened. One thing is now
certain, that America will enter the conflict and that the conflict
will be so long that she will be able to realize all her potential
forces. This morning I told this to the King who had been pleased
about the event. He ended by admitting that, in the long run, I may be
right. Mussolini was happy, too. For a long time he has favored a
definite clarification of relations between America and the Axis."
The final document consists of the top-secret notes of a conference
between Hitler and Japanese Ambassador Oshima on 14 December