Bang, bang… bye, bye Adolf. Hell, I’m not a pacifist.
Once I read a short story in a science fiction magazine (can anyone identify this story?), with the following time-travel-kill-Hitler premise:
The would-be assassin, a Jew, has a time travel technology that won’t take him back bodily. Only his mind can go back and take over another person’s body. So he goes back to before WWI, and takes over young Hitler’s body. He walks him to the river and jumps him in to drown. Hitler doesn’t drown. Whoops.
Not only does he get out of the river alive, he musters enough willpower to overcome the suicidal impulses planted by the Jewish time traveler. The would-be assassin also find that his time travel thingy is broken and he’s permanently stuck inside Hitler.
Up until then, Hitler had had nothing against Jews. But now he’s aware of a hostile alien Jewish presence inside him and it drives him nuts. Enough to go on a major rampage …
Big whoops. I guess the moral of the story is “don’t fuck with the past,” plus a dose of major irony.
Personally, my fantasy is always going back to Dallas and jumping in front of JFK’s car just as it rounds the corner of Elm Street. “Stop, Mr. President!” I know I’d get clobbered by the Secret Service but it would raise an alarm and create enough delay to foil the gunmen.
Hmm, I am not sure if I would mess with the past AT ALL. Think about it, if everything did not happen exactly how it happened, everything would be radically different. You would not be here if your parents did not copulate at the EXACT same time and in the exact(cough) manner that they did. Minute changes would expand exponentially over time. Killing Hitler would radically change everone’s future. I am not sure what the outcome would be and I don’t think I can guess on behalf of the ENTIRE world.
That’s just my 2 cents!
Thanks,
Matt Shepard
Hitler did some atrocious things in the time he was in power, but to say that it could be prevented by re-educating/kidnapping/killing him is, honestly, ridiculous.
Christalnacht and subsequent events where not the work of one person, not even the work of a small group, but literally thousands of people. Dictator 101 teaches us that in order to implement a totalitarian regime, we need a scapegoat. Throughout history, Europe has always had a convenient scapegoat in every major city throughout the continent: Jews. Initially, Jews were merely a tool with which Hitler implemented his totalitarian regime and a step in the direction of his ambition to take over the world. Stalin did something remarkably similar.
(disclaimer: I’m not trying to trivialise what Hitler did. My intention is to show that his actions are a consequence of events which took place before he was born.)
When looking at root causes of Hitler’s rise to power and subsequently WW2, two can be identified: The Versailles Treaty and the economic malaise caused by the wall street crash. Hitler was mainly at the right place at the right time. Someone else could easily have taken his place.
The Versailles treaty crippled Germany in political, economic and military sense. This put a huge dent in the German national pride. The Wall street crash was the final straw that led germane into the downward spiral. Other nations could struggle out because they had economic reserves. Germany had none (due to Versailles). The only way for Germany to get out of this spiral was to obtain resources from outside, either by economic aid or war.
I will not go into the Wall Street crash because I am not really familiar with its overall causes and effects, but will assume it was inevitable. Likewise I will not speculate how the outcome of WW1 could have been altered.
WW1 was also inevitable. Too many things led up to it. Too many would be emperors living in on a very small continent at the same time. Colonialism in the past centuries led to huge concentrations of power within a very small group of people. Blows were bound to fall. Think about it: The Prussian (German) Empire, The Austrian-Hungarian Empire, The Russian Empire and the British Empire. Europe was a literal powder-keg
Otto ‘realpolitik’ von Bismark probably helped diffuse the very tense situation by keeping Germany out of the colonial wars of Africa.
The ‘Great Power system’ was also inevitable. Again, too many empires in one small continent. The fact that only a few existed instead of several dozens of smaller kingdoms probably delayed the war. It led to a stalemate in which the declaration of war on one nation meant that the entire continent would be plunged into war.
Th OP got his question from the Dead Zone so I’m going to approach it from the same source -
In the novel Johnny saw what was only a possible future should Stillson succeed in his political ambitions, that was what the dead zone of the title was all about - it was the area of uncertainty about the future - the tiny zone in which things could be changed and then the future he saw would no longer be the likely outcome of a run of events. Hence the kids being saved from the fire (the thin ice in the movie) rather than burning (or drowning) as he originally saw. The whole problem with the ‘would you kill Hitler’ question was that there was no dead zone involved, Hitler was the past, the concrete result of a specific chain of events and as such not quite the same as the post nuclear Stillson Johnny was struggling do deal with. With Stillson, the zone allowed for change, with Hitler it was a done deal. Johnny’s question was just him trying to establish some rationalization for something he’d pretty much already decided to do - stop a world killing monster from being born.
That being said, I think it would take a bit more than the assination of Hitler to stop WWII, it may, however, have done a bit to keep those 12-13 million dead in the concentration camps out and alive.
I would go back, taking with me “Schindler’s List” I would then force an early teen years Hitler to watch it with me. I would also take with me a few of the books written on the topic in hopes he reads them and realizes his mistakes. Then I would convince him I was a messenger sent to him for the express purpose of helping him do something great with his power. I would force a discussion on why he thinks he turns into such a monster and ways to avoid it. I would try to impart some moral values on him and encourage him to do something that would leave him in the history books as a great leader. I would continue to go back and visit him at intervals to make sure this worked.
Imagine if he used his power over Germany to do good instead of evil.
If for some reason this didn’t work, then I’d have to go back and keep him from killing himself so he would have to stand trial for war crimes, genocide…
Or maybe throw him in his own concentration camp.
I don’t think killing Hitler would make much of a difference.