| Letters to the Editor | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Letters to the Editor | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

Professor Gerhard Weinberg says in his reply letter (JAH, Dec. 2004, pp. 1156–57) that there is not a shred of documentary evidence to support my assertion that Adolf Hitler denied or retracted his December 11, 1941, declaration of war on the United States on December 12, 1941. Why has Professor Weinberg chosen to completely ignore the documentary support of that in my book? He makes no mention of it at all, disingenuously claiming it came from my imagination. At the very least he might have contended that the evidence I did cite was not credible, or that the Associated Press story of that denial/retraction was itself a fabrication. That is not the only example of Professor Weinberg's evasiveness in his comments.

In his second paragraph, Professor Weinberg again focuses on why Germany took certain steps toward war with the United States, but not on the point of my book, that being why the United States took its own steps toward war. Again, Professor Weinberg has chosen to ignore my book on American history by emphasizing his own on German history. In so doing, Professor Weinberg again demonstrates evasiveness as he simply prefers to change the subject.

In his third paragraph, Professor Weinberg's central point is to dismiss the relevance of U.S. press reporting on U.S. government policies. If he is correct that the U.S. press had U.S. government motivations wrong, what about the Congressional Record and presidential speeches that I also cited? But Professor Weinberg simply ignores those official U.S. government explanations, the ones that correlate with all the press reports. Professor Weinberg talks a lot about imagination, but the reader will be left to imagine why Professor Weinberg refuses to tackle any of my emphases head on, preferring to ignore them, presumably hoping that no one will notice.

Richard F. Hill

Palm Beach Atlantic University
Palm Beach, Florida

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