1 Kingdom of Yugoslavia

On March 25th, 1941 in Vienna, Prince Paul (Pavle), Regent of Kingdom of Yugoslavia, signed the Tripartite Pact. It was not easy for Hitler to gain Yugoslavia's cooperation. There were strong anti-German feelings in the country, especially among the Serbian population. March 27th the regime was overthrown by a military coup d'état with British support, and the 18 year old King Peter II of Yugoslavia seized power.

Although the new rulers opposed Nazi Germany, they also feared that if Hitler attacked Yugoslavia, Britain was not in any real position to help. For the safety of the country, they declared that Yugoslavia would adhere to the Tripartite Pact.

Postponing Operation Barbarossa the Germans simultaneously attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. From April 6th, Luftwaffe pounded Belgrade to the ground for three days and three nights. German ground troops moved in, and Yugoslavia capitulated on April 17th.

2 German declaration of war

On December 7th, Japan attacked the United States' naval bases at Pearl Harbor. According to the stipulation of the Tripartite Pact, Nazi-Germany was required to come to the defense of her allies only if they were attacked. Since Japan had made the first move and attacked, Germany was not obligated to aid. On December 11th, Hitler entered the Reichstag to formally declare war on the United States, thus quenching that US opinion which opposed USA's engagement against the Third Reich.

This declaration of war against the United States was arguably the greatest mistake made by the Third Reich — it played directly into the desires of the U.S. President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to become engaged in the defense of Great Britain, largely to preserve a staging base for the strategic air bombardment of German industrial capacity and for the eventual defeat of German domination of Europe by an invasion of the continent.

While the plans of the German military effort included an eventual attack directly upon the U.S., this was to be only after the consolidation of German and Italian control over all of Europe, most of Africa, and enough of the Soviet Union to give Germany an industrial and resource capacity equivalent or superior to that of the United States. To this would be added Germany's technological and scientific capabilities — generally considered to be up to a decade in advance of that of the U. S. This would allow the creation of long range bombers, intercontinental missiles, super battleships with 24 inch guns, and perhaps even the atomic bomb. All this would ensure (in theory) that the dominion of the Third Reich would be extended to the Americas.

The premature declaration of war was at a time when Germany was significantly ahead in warfighting capacity only in the limited areas of submarines, tactical ground attack aircraft and fast land based armor ( tanks) — the latter two committed for use against the USSR on the Eastern Front in Operation Barbarossa. Cruise missiles (in the form of the V-1 flying bomb) and ballistic rockets (the V-2 rocket) were in active development and would soon be in quantity production and use against England. In other matters of military technology the Third Reich enjoyed no special advantage. Along with the failure of Operation Barbarossa, the early awakening of the U.S. would prove to spell the eventual doom of the Third Reich — as in the war against Japan, largely due to the United States' superior industrial capacity, oceanic isolation, and the rich resources of the Americas. Without this declaration, the Third Reich might have been able to attempt and possibly win a second Battle of Britain.

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