Assume for the sake of argument that you have no qualms about doing the deed as such; you’re only concerned about the best consequences.
The potential benefits to killing Young Hitler are obvious: maybe there’s no WWII, or if there is maybe it’s more limited in scope, and either way it likely doesn’t come with the Holocaust or the otherwise especially deplorable treatment of POWs or conquered peoples.
On the other hand, there are plenty of potential problems with trying to alter history this way, including:
– It might not work very well. While the specific group of people that came to power in Germany certainly fails to do so without a Hitler, it’s no coincidence that expansionist, authoritarian, nationalist factions took hold when they did. You might just wind up with a slightly different shade of war.
– Perhaps you do more or less stop the next war, but in the process you also stop the defeat of fascism and the chance for the Western democracies to write the history books. Anti-democratic, strongman (i.e. more or less fascist) regimes were rather in vogue in the pre-war years in Europe. It wasn’t just Italy, Germany, and Spain; states such as Poland and Austria had also essentially dumped their liberal institutions for autocracies. Without the war, perhaps this trend fails to reverse itself, or even gathers steam.
– The history of the Soviet Union would be altered in unimaginable ways. Perhaps without the war the state softens, or fails to exert the influence in Eastern Europe that it eventually did, or even collapses sooner. OTOH, perhaps Stalinism would still be with us.
– Nukes. This is the big one, probably. They would be coming along at some point, and maybe in a manner that’s relatively less benign than has actually happened so far. Maybe a still-fascist Germany (or some other expansionist power) gets there first and uses them liberally. Maybe the taboo against their use never quite develops, so that dozens or hundreds of major cities have been leveled by now. Etc.
So, if you actually had the opportunity to hop in your time machine and kill Young Hitler, should you?
Quite possibly someone else would have started the war of revenge for the 1918 Dolchstoß. It was a very popular view in Weimar Germany. They might even have been better at accomplishing it.
I’m surprised no one has tried to put to film (or animation) the result of the invention of a time machine. All of a sudden probably millions of people would instantly appear back in 1935 (give or take) and attempt to kill Hitler.
Well it was Hitler’s charimsa that helped unify the nazi party, so its possible it wouldn’t have got so far without him. But liekly another extremist party would have gotten in, and with how harsly Germany was treated, the odds of another was seems likely. And if the Nazi’s got in without Hitler going crazy and doing stupid things like attackign Russia in the winter, its possible we would have lost the war, and that would be bad…
To stop the whole thing, maybe a better way of doing it would somehow ensuring germany gets punished less harshly at the end of WW1, thus the country doesn’t reach the desperate conditions that let the nazi’s rise up and take control, and Hitler ends up as a fail rebel and nothing else.
BUT without the Nazi dictatorship to set an example for the world, would we have had more gennocidal dictatorships across the world?
The underlying question of the OP appears to be, if we retossed the dice / reran the simulation of the 20th century, would it be more likely to be better or worse? In other words, was it on balance better or worse than could have been expected given the starting conditions?
Taking the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as data points, here’s my vote for leaving well-enough alone. Multiple world wars, genocides, oppression are par for the course. Some of the positive achievements though are extra-ordinary.
Psst…he attacked Russia in June. Furthermore, historian John Keegan points out that the spring rasputitsa (the wet season after the permafrost melts and turns the roads impassable) ended in mid-June in 1941, so the Germans couldn’t have attacked any sooner without being bogged down. They started the invasion as far from winter as was physically possible.
Stephen Fry’s novel Making History covers this, sort of; a professor at Cambridge invents a kind of half-assed time machine, and a graduate (history) student convinces him to use it to drug a well in Branau (the village where Hitler was born) to make people who drank the water infertile.
Hitler never gets born. Instead, a guy who survived WWI because Hitler wasn’t there (I forget how, exactly, but I think he volunteered for something Hitler would have volunteered for, and ended up not getting killed in a trench explosion or somesuch) becomes the leader of the Nazi Party. Because he doesn’t have Hitler’s ego, he doesn’t scare off all the Jewish scientists at Heidelburg University, and doesn’t try to run the war himself, and conquers all of Europe before signing a treaty with the US.
Then he gets scientists to analyze the water in a certain town in Austria, which has the remarkable property of making men infertile, and has them synthesize a pill which is administered to all Jewish men…
I thought the allies wanted to keep Hitler alive because he mismanaged the war effort so badly. Had someone more competent been in charge the war could’ve gone on even longer than it did.
That is assuming that a right wing party would still come to power and end up starting a war, which is not a given.
Ma bad, my knowledge of history came from one of those history books.
So how did Germany end up in such a drastic depression? I mean all the countries were hit hard by the war, and I hear France took the most damage, so why was it Germany’s econamy that declined the most? Or was that exagerated to?
The computer game Command and Conquer: Red Alert starts from the premise that a time-traveller did, indeed, kill Hitler when he was still young. The result is a World War II of Stalin vs. everyone else, and it’s even more brutal for not having Nazi Germany slowing him down.
Well it was a worldwide depression, and Germany’s hyper-inflation was largely a cynical manipulation of their own doing. That said, I don’t feel entirely competent to explain or pass judgment on the relative strengths of European economies in the inter-war years.
It seems decently likely that the there would have been a WWII, but who knows whether it would have been better or worse. Either way, Russia and the US could still have ended it, so I don’t see much difference in the outcome. Though it would be a heck of a dice roll for there to have been a Holocaust without Hitler.
Hatred of the Jews would likely have survived until later without the Holocaust. I don’t think that there would have been a significant difference in the US – the Jews would start to make social headway in the 60s and 70s, regardless – but Europe would have been behind us. There probably wouldn’t be a modern-day Israel.
What that would mean for the rise of Wahhabism in the Middle East, I can’t say. The existence of lots of Free Money below the dirt seems to have funded Wahhabism, but minus Israel, there might not have been such a political focus point as to allow Wahhabism to grow into the force it is. On the other hand, the Cold War might still have been a sufficient political focal point to lead the Islamic countries to find a common link like Fundamentalist Islam. Overall, though, I think that Fundamentalism would probably still have taken over the area, but the area would have ended up more like Vietnam or South America – not really happy with the US after a few decades of us playing about with changing around their dictators for our own sake, but now settling down to be themselves. I don’t think there would be the terrorist movement. There wouldn’t have been a 9-11.
No Holocaust. No 9-11. No Israel. Unknown amount of death and destruction during WWII. How that balances out, I can’t say.
Going by the existence of the Eastern Block, I suspect that given the chance, the Russians would have used the pretext of the war as a way to carry off a land-grab no matter what. Unless they allied with Germany, they would have done something to make it seem like they had been attacked or were worried about being attacked, and joined the war.
They did ally with Germany, and while it’s possible (though unlikely) that the Soviets would have attacked Germany, much of what became the Eastern Bloc was held by Germany at the time.
I wasn’t aware of that, but the question would still remain of whether Stalin would stick to that if Germany went into hyperactive conquest mode? Perhaps he would have, but I suspect that he would have been rather nervous about having a large, unified nation establishing itself on his border.