総統大本営
Author Ian Kershaw records Hitler's initial reaction to the attack, when he was first informed about it on the evening of 7 December at Führer Headquarters: "We can't lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years". Well before the attack, in 1928 Hitler had confided in the text of his then-unpublished "Zweites Buch" that while the Soviet Union was the most important immediate foe that the Third Reich had to defeat, the United States was the most important long-term challenge to Nazi aims.