Did Germany want the US to declare war?

Answer 1

No, very much NOT- they thought that as long as Britain remained isolated without US support, the chances of The Third Reich remaining were much greater. They gave up on the idea of a land invasion of Britain after the Battle of Britain in 1940, when their plans for an air and seaborne assault codenamed 'Operation Sealion' were shelved, but they still felt that if Britain could not be conquered, it could at least remain an isolated entity. The hope was that via a combination of espionage and internal British dissent, a Nazi-friendly British Government could be installed that would sign a peace treaty with Germany and become like Quisling's Norway or Unoccupied France under Marshal Petain. This would have involved the overthrow of the British Government under Churchill by British Nazi sympathisers and it's replacement by a Fascist regime headed by someone like the UK Fascist leader Oswald Moseley, and the replacement of King George VI with the abdicated Edward VIII, who by then was living in exile in France (Edward was known to admire the Nazis, although this was before he knew about The Holocaust). There was some sympathy for the Nazis by the Irish, who although officially neutral, and generally tacitly against Hitler, did include a sizeable proportion of the population who wanted to see Britain - or at least England - broken as a dominant power, and some Irish and also a few Welsh people were employed by Germany as secret agents.

But President Franklin D.Roosevelt was fervently Anglophile, and supported the UK financially and with armaments against Hitler. He was itching for an excuse to declare war on Nazi Germany, but could not do so without the US being seen as the aggressor. Pearl Harbour in 1941 gave him that excuse- Japan and Germany were bound by treaty whereby any attack upon one was regarded as an attack upon the other, so in declaring war against Japan, the USA was by extension declaring war on the US as well.