How about if you lived at the time and you had no knowledge of what was going to happen? Would you kill Hitler if you lived in the '30s or '40s?
(see this thread:http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=78143)
I don’t think I would kill anyone, especialy if I had no idea that they would become Hitler.
Actually, why should anyone who knew Hitler killed him? A nice discussion on ethics might be nice, but murder?
I don’t know that I’d kill him right from the start, not knowing what he was intending to do, but after he started the concentration camps etc, I’d try to kill him. If I’m not mistaken, I believe that there was a man that plotted to kill Hitler during the last stages of the war, but someone found out and stopped him.
Close, but it was actually a conspiracy - and IIRC, Erwin Rommel took the fall for it because the conspirators were using his name to lend credibility to the movement. I wonder if things would have ended up better or worse had they succeeded. Making Hitler a martyr would not have been a good thing, though it would have been a distinct possibility. I’m uncertain of the likelihood that any successor would have been better, and in any case, the war was grinding to a close. At best, they could have sued for peace and saved lives on both the Axis and Allied sides.
The so-called July Plot was a pretty extensive conspiracy, which included Rommel among others. Its leaders seem to have been more motivated by Germany’s increasingly desparate military situation than by concern for the fate of the Jews or any longing for a liberal democracy. They probably would have sued for peace and tried for something other than “unconditional surrender” to the Allies. Rommel actually was spared the full brunt of the plot’s failure–he was permitted an “honorable death” by suicide, in light of the prestige of his military service. Many others who participated in the plot were executed–some of them were tortured first, and some of the executions were carried out by slow and painful methods.
No, I wouldn’t do it. If I didn’t know what was going to happen then how would I be able to kill someone I don’t know? I would have to know for sure. Of course if he came right out and told everyone what he intended to do, then maybe I would.
Time travel or not, killing Hitler would still disrupt the future and make it utterly unstable. Sure, 10 million people dying is bad, but with Stalin’s success in the future, imagine how many more millions would have died if someone who was… well… discreet… about his murders gained power?
–Tim