Today in History, December 11th
On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. Plus Edward VIII's abdication and the Apollo 17 Moon landing.
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December 11 is best known as the day in 1941 when Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States, four days after Pearl Harbor. The date also saw Edward VIII’s abdication approved by Parliament in 1936 and Apollo 17 make the last crewed Moon landing in 1972.
The big story: Germany Declares War on the United States (1941)
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. was at war with Japan, but not with Germany. Hitler settled that question himself. On the morning of December 11, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told the top American diplomat in Berlin that Germany now considered itself at war with the U.S. That afternoon Hitler went before the Reichstag, blamed Franklin Roosevelt for the conflict, and listed what he called American offenses against Germany. Fascist Italy declared war on the U.S. too. Germany’s alliance with Japan did not require any of this, since Japan had struck first. Hitler seems to have believed war with America was coming anyway and that Japan would keep the U.S. busy in the Pacific. Roosevelt asked Congress to answer in kind, and declarations of war against both countries passed that same day. The historian Martin Gilbert called it Hitler’s biggest mistake of the war.
More events on December 11
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1792 | King Louis XVI appeared before France’s National Convention to face charges of treason. He was found guilty the next month and executed on January 21, 1793. |
| 1816 | Indiana was admitted to the Union as the 19th state. |
| 1936 | Parliament approved Edward VIII’s abdication, and that evening the former king explained his decision in a radio broadcast. |
| 1946 | The UN General Assembly created UNICEF, first set up as an emergency fund to help children hurt by World War II. |
| 1972 | Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt landed in the Moon’s Taurus-Littrow valley. It was the final landing of the Apollo program. |
| 1994 | Russian troops and tanks rolled into Chechnya, which had declared independence. It was Russia’s largest military offensive since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. |
| 1997 | Delegates meeting in Kyoto, Japan, adopted the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It took effect in 2005. |
| 2008 | Federal agents arrested financier Bernard Madoff in New York and charged him with securities fraud. At the time of his arrest, losses from his scheme were put at about $50 billion; later estimates ran higher. |
Born on December 11
- 1803: Hector Berlioz, French Romantic composer of the Symphonie fantastique.
- 1843: Robert Koch, German doctor who found the bacteria behind tuberculosis and cholera.
- 1882: Fiorello La Guardia, the scrappy reform mayor of New York City.
- 1918: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist who exposed the Soviet prison camp system.
Sources
- Hitler’s Declaration of War on the United States, The National WWII Museum
- Germany declares war on the United States, History.com
- Trial and Execution of Louis XVI, World History Encyclopedia
- Indiana Admitted to the Union, EBSCO Research Starters
- Edward VIII, Britannica
- Emerging from the ashes of war: 1946–1979, UNICEF
- Apollo 17, Final Lunar Landing Mission, Lands on Moon, NASA
- Yeltsin orders Russian forces into Chechnya, History.com
- Kyoto Protocol, UNFCCC (archived)
- Press release on the arrest of Bernard L. Madoff, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York
