This is the plot of a novel by Stephen Fry called Making History - it’s a good read, although the storyline itself is better than the ‘science bit’, which isn’t all that convincing.
I’ll not spoil it, except to say that rather than killing Hitler, he goes back a bit further and prevents him being concieved.
It might be more efficient to just take out Marx.
How about we go back in time, take Hitler, strip him, tie him up, and drop him off in a settlement of Jews somewhere.
Hehehe…revenge is sweet.
I’m going to have to say no. Killing Hitler would be a bad idea. Not for any morality reasons, but for the simple reason that we don’t know what would happen. WWII had such a profound impact on the past 50 years that I think it would be foolhearty to go back in time to mess with it.
I don’t think it would be possible to change history dramatically anyway. I think history, like the rest of the universe, would probably have some kind of inertia to it. You wouldn’t be able to kill Hitler because you are just one little person, 50 years before everything you know. It’s one thing to know that the Nazis invaded Poland on a certain date in History. It’s another thing to find a young Hitler at a specific date and time. Also, you wouldn’t be viewed as the savior of the free world. You would be seen as some strange guy with odd mannerisms and a funny accent who keeps asking about that little Adolph boy. Odds are you probably would get run out of town before you could even get close.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Weird_AL_Einstein *
**
And get Nietzsche while you’re at it. Might solve the Hitler problem before it starts.
Intellectually, yes. I want to know the effects of his removal.
Morally, yes. This would quite possibly save the lives of ten million people (not only Jews died, y’know).
Realistically, no. It’s too uncertain. The German downward spiral may have continued, bringing Europe to ruin with it. Or the Nazis might have won. Or Russia might have won. Or Russia and the USA become friends and we all live on the moon. It’s too uncertain to change history!
Nein. The sins of the son are not the sins of the father. Do not blame the idea for the action. Knowledge denied is knowledge lost. Do not make a grave mistake when you can make a small one.
A man so evil is to be studied to see how a man can become so evil, just as a man so good is studied to see how a man can be so good.
Would we deny the world contained in Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” because it can be used to kill? Would we deny the world Machiavelli’s “The Prince” because it can be used to subvert? Such as we should not deny the world Neitzsche or Marx because it can be used by Hitler. Nor should we deny Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” because it can be used by a neo-Nazi.
To deny knowledge is to deny, nein, destroy, possibility. And without possiblity for evil, there is not a possibility for good.
He is not to be killed.
–Tim
I would go back in time to 1911 and not kill Hitler but try to get him to drink and chase after women. I would channel all his rage into self destructive behavior not world destructive behavior. The world would be a much better place with a drunk lusty Hitler. Everyone likes a failed alchoholic artist maniac pervert, their work sometimes even becomes famous years after their death, selling for millions of dollars. But nobody likes a failed artist/ Dictator Murderer. At least I don’t.
Interesting screen name you got there…
This seems to be the general line of thinking in this thread. But I find it somewhat disturbing. Obviously, we don’t have the ability to time travel, and we won’t have the ability to time travel (the dreams of my high school physics teacher Jack Sarfatti nonwithstanding).
But this is a fictional concept. So lets go with it. I can assume in this fictional world that you would give decisions the same considerations you give them now. Hitler was evil. Pure and simple. Kill him. The same way you can try to kill Saddam or Bin Laden now even though you don’t know what will happen. Maybe Bin Laden’s great-grandson will cure cancer. Oh, well, we’ll never really know.
And if you really want to use the powers you’re given here, after you kill Hitler, go ahead and kill Stalin too!
Maybe a better way to rephrase the question is, if you could go back in time and save thousands of Jews from the Nazis, would you? Or would you be concerned about the effects this could have on the future?
As so many people have already taken the “Don’t mess with the timestream” reasons not to do it, I won’t elaborate on that. However, if your goal is to avert World War II, I think you’re going for the wrong guy. The destitution inflicted on Germany after World War I bred a great deal of resentment in Germany. The generals were also planning to go back to war, and some historians think that they were planning to have him deposed and killed if he failed at Munich. Killing Hitler would just put someone else in charge who probably would have been a better tactician than Hitler was (Rommel maybe?), and Germany could have won.
So, to avert WWII, you’d need to stop WWI from happening as well (unless you can go to the treaty talks at Versailles and convince the diplomats that you’re from the future and they’ll be really sorry if they don’t listen to Wilson. I’m assuming our time traveller couldn’t pull this off.) But World War I was just a matter of time in coming after the changes in the balance of power in the late 19th century created the interlocking web of alliances and secret treaties that brought the war about. To prevent that from happening, you would need to prevent that which caused the shift in the balance of power in the first place- the unification of Germany. And no one was more responsible for bringing that about than your real target, Otto von Bismarck.
Of course, then you’re messing with about 140 years of history instead of 60 or 70, and the lack of Germany in the new timeline would really change things. Perhaps it’s best we don’t.
You may want to pick up a short but interesting book called Hitler’s Niece. He chased after women plenty. His own flesh and blood in fact…and allegedly killed them when they refused to participate in his FemDom fantasies.
It’s a good book!
jarbaby
Ok, good revised question. Yes, I would go back in time and try to save thousands of Jews from the Nazis. But I couldn’t do this by killing a person (Hitler) who had not yet committed any crimes. What would I do? I have no idea. Try to convince other people that Hitler is a bad idea, and we should all campaign against him. Essentially, the same things I would do now if I thought a politician was a horrible person. The way I would act if a person came back from the future, and told me that Mr. Seemingly Minor Politician is going to be the next Hitler, and we have to kill him now. Even though they might convince me that this person’s agenda is nasty, I would still have to act according to my own conscience, and not go around killing people who are innocent of crimes against humanity.
To shift from the philosophical focus to the “wow, isn’t time travel a mind screw” focus … what if you did go back in time to kill Hitler, and ran into someone else who had come back in time to retroactively save the world.
“What a coincidence!” you say “I’m here to kill Hitler too!”
“Who’s Hitler?” says your new friend, “I’m here to kill Igor Poodlewiggler, you know, the egomaniac who rises to power in Germany, attempts world domination, slaughters millions in the process…”
Now what do you do? Kill them both?
Kill Hitler? No. There are other interesting ways of altering history around this point.
Hitler, of course, didn’t rise in a vacuum of history, as others have pointed out. But the Weimar Republic arose both out of the rubble of WWI and the failure of the revolutionary period of 1918-1923. detop hits the nail on the head with his remark about the “homegrown” revolution being a counterweight to Stalin - of course, if it had happened in 1918 or 1919 it would have helped bolster the original Bolshevik revolution in Russia and decreased the potential of Stalinism in the first place.
If I remember my history correctly, during the tumults in Germany after the war, several Communists were asking for Trotsky’s personal help in pushing the revolution further. This was about 1922, when Lenin was too ill to involve himself in politics. Stalin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev wouldn’t let him go, and the revolutionary movement collapsed - leading to the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (or was it Wilhelm? I always get the two confused).
So I wouldn’t kill Hitler if I had the chance - I’d go back and do my damnedest to smuggle Trotsky into Germany. I’m not saying his presence would have guaranteed the success of a German workers’ revolution, but if it had succeeded the rise of Hitler would never have happened.
my head hurts
Ah, poor Geli!
His niece, the daughter of his half-sister. Hitler was madly obsessed with her-supposedly he raped her and she committed suicide. HOWEVER, there is also the suggestion that he had her murdered, because she spurned his advances. From what I understand, Hitler was that creepy uncle with the Roman Hands and Russian Fingers, if you get my meaning.
She also supposedly was in love with a soldier who was half-Jewish, according to one rumor.
Read ‘History’ by Stephen Fry. Now.
They find a way to stop Hitler ever being born, thus allowing a competent leader to rise to the top (Hitler having killed the competent leader in reality).
It’s an incredibly good book, with as much as possible based on real life events.
Read it. 
No. Assuming time travel is possible doing something like that would have profound effects. If I or someone else did travel back in time and succeeded in killing Hitler it’s possible to return to a time where you don’t exist. Of course I would gladly (would I?) give up my existance for the good of humanity. (then again maybe not. Maybe humanity doesn’t deserve it.) But in changing history I may alter other events. Who knows what would happen? I may kill Hitler only to return to a world where there had been a nuclear war and nothing was left. Who knows? Best not tamper with something that we are not suppose to tamper with.
No! If Prussia under Bismarck hadn’t unified Germany, someone else would have…the German states were ripe for unification. The war would still have come about, because of the Great Power system that had developed. You and I know who we need to kill…the author of the whole “balance of power” idea…Mr. Congress of Vienna himself. That’s right, Prince Klemens von Metternich.
Probably not. Aside from all the time travel paradoxes, repercussions, yadda-yadda-yadda, never mind all that. My problem would be with the purposeful taking of another life. Yes, he was responsible for the deaths of millions, but I don’t know if I have in me what it takes to kill someone else. I definitely couldn’t kill him as a child. If his death was the only option, I’d have to wait until he lost that ‘innocence’ and was already the man who would decide to carry out his plans.
Granted, people make justifiable decisions to end another’s life every day and still find ways to sleep at night. I just don’t know if I’m one of them.
How about if you lived at the time of Hitler? Would you kill him then? Say you were unaware of the future and had only the information available to you at the time of Hitler’s life. I’ll give you the option of being in a position to know more than the average person of the time; say you were someone in a position to know about many or all of the things he did or said. Would you kill him? When? At what point in history? I’ve started a new thread since this is almost a separate topic. It it here.