Wouldn’t kill him. Reason seven. Nobody is born “evil;” Hitler’s rise to power had more to do with the anti-Semitism that had been brewing in Germany (and Europe in general) for the past few centuries instead of some personal flaw. Yeah, he was a paranoid narcissist, a really not-nice guy, but it was society that allowed him to do what he did. And if he wasn’t there, it would have been Goebbels that would have become the Fuhrer, or Mengele, or some random peasant. The time was just right for that kind of tragedy to happen. Unless you have a time machine that can travel back centuries and have enough time and resources to educate the entire European continent, the Holocaust (and WWII) are still going to happen.
[slight hijack]It’s been years since I read the Bradbury story, and I forget the ending. Can someone spoil it for me?[/slight hijack]
I remeber seeing a documentry on him once. It said that when he was still realitively young he applied to some fancy art school and was denied admission.
It kind of makes one wonder; had he been accepted, would we’ve ever even heard of Adolf Hittler?
Or even more so, can we blame this fancy-schmancy art school for WW2?
/puts down the pipe…
Not that it necessarily makes much difference, but Hitler was born in 1889 and was thus fifteen years old in 1904.
For the sake of argument, let’s say I choose to kill young Herr Hitler. Do I come back to a world in which all evidence of his adult life is wiped out, or are there all these stamps, photos, books, and other documents about a guy who never actually rose to power, let alone became a synonym for evil? Kind of a reverse of Holocaust revisionism, with a few crackpots insisting this Hitler existed despite all serious historians’ dismissive laughter at the very idea? Is a form of Godwin’s Law known to the online community (if, indeed, such a gathering of souls exists?) If so, whose name appears in place of Hitler’s? Another Nazi’s? Stalin’s? Hirohito’s? Churchill’s?
I remember it only vaguely and I’m pretty sure it was a tv/HBO movie. The basic premise was (IIRC), you’re sitting in a bar in 1930 having a drink with Hitler. You have poison, he gets up to take a piss. Do you poison him?
This whole discussion led to the participants killing several people and burying them in their back yard in the name of the greater good, again IIRC.
You may be interested to know that one of the groups Hitler had it in for were Jehovah’s witnesses; you can find out about that at the Museum of Tolerance.
I always interpreted this episode that, if the original baby had lived, history would have been changed. Baby #1 wasn’t the historical Hitler; baby #2 was. So history wasn’t altered.
