I know, I know. It’s probably the most hackneyed moral question imaginable, but still, I’m curious, and I did a search and I couldn’t find any previous polls on this so I thought I’d ask.
The question is: If you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Hitler when he was a child? For the purposes of this question, assume that killing him is your only viable option. You can’t turn him into a pacifist and you can’t take him out of Germany. You can either kill him, or not. That’s it.
So, would you do it?
Just a couple of ground rules, very quickly:
Absolutely NO fighting the hypothetical!
Please explain your answer either way.
Please don’t debate other people’s answers. I’m not interested in whether or not killing young Hitler is the right thing to do in principle. I just want to know what you think, and why.
Thanks.
FWIW, I would go back and kill young Hitler. I don’t know whether doing so would have prevented WWII, but I do think there’s a good chance that it would. And even if I’m wrong about that, I’m confident that doing so would ensure that one side wasn’t being run by a bunch of rabidly anti-semitic lunatics.
So this would improve the competence of the top level German command in WWII. Maybe we get a Germany that doesn’t invade Russia, but succeeds in taking over Western Europe. And isn’t run by lunatics.
No. As bad as Hitler was, we dodged a much bigger bullet with the Cold War. Nuclear weapons were inevitable and any change you made to history at that point, good or bad, would have unpredictable consequences down the line and could easily result in the extinction of humanity (or at least most of it) through nuclear war.
I honestly don’t know. Doing so would cause me and my entire family to blink out of existence, assuming killing Hitler has the desired effects (which is a very debatable premise).
I kind of dont agree with this. No country would/could have thrown the resources down the rabbit hole to build one nor built an allstar team of international talent to do it. Until the bomb was successfully tested no one was sure it would have worked.
I also disagree that we dodged a bigger bullet than Hitler. Hitler committed genocide. He started wars that cost the lives of tens of millions. He also brought the bomb into reality far sooner than it would have been created, if ever.
No one is wise enough to predict the path of History.
WW2 would have happened, Hitler or no.
The ideas that lead to the Holocaust existed in Austria & German, as far back as the 19th Century, & were not born with Hitler.
The flawed peace of WW1 would lead to WW2, eventually.
Hitler was not needed.
Another would have filled his role, in the events that were…inevitable.
It didn’t turn out too bad, we’re alive, the nazis lost etc etc. It might have been worse with not-Hitler. How about someone who does the same thing but does NOT go crazy and invade Russia or take direct control of military operations.
But it’s also interesting to know if I will stay in that time or if I will be back to an updated timeline when the deed is done (assuming I still exist, which is impossible to know).
If I stay I’m probably even less likely to do it because of two very selfish reasons:
I don’t want to get caught and I don’t think “No really sir, he would have gone on to become a horrible tyrant! You have to believe me, I’m from the future!” is going to make a good defense in court.
As long as I don’t change anything drastic like that, I will have a very good grasp on what will be going on in the “future”. I could use this for personal gain, or to speed up our progress, or both. Assuming I am not in jail for murder trying to convince people I am a time traveller.
If I am going back it makes more sense to kill him. Then I will come back to a new and unexplored world, if I come back at all. If it is less advanced because of what I did, I can perhaps provide knowledge from my timeline, if it is more advanced then whoopee, I did it!
Anyway, my assumption is that if I go back and kill Hitler during childhood, then everything that has happened since that intervention - the entire history of the world since - is up for grabs, and can play out similarly or quite differently.
Everyone conceived since then (which would mean all of us!) are gone and replaced by a completely different world full of people; odds are essentially certain that the night your great-grandparents fucked and conceived your grandparents, a different sperm cell bonked into the egg, or none did at all, or just as likely they didn’t even have sex that night. The people born as a result, if any were born, aren’t the people who were your grandparents, and so your grandparents never met because they never existed anyway, let alone your parents.
So the question is, do I want to roll the dice on how history since, say, 1895 (when Adolf was 6 years old) would play out if it got re-run without little Adolf, and with random events playing out in perhaps rather different ways from then on - knowing that it’s a suicide mission because I would never have been born?
No, I don’t. It would be an even bigger holocaust, by a couple of orders of magnitude, really, to erase 120 years’ worth of people with all their growth and experiences.
FWIW, I don’t regard this as fighting the hypothetical. This is within the hypothetical, but it’s my interpretation of issues that the hypothetical fails to address.
The ideas that led to the Holocaust were alive in many places. The reason it happened in the third reich is because it was specifically ordered by Hitler and carried out under unique circumstances. There would have been no Holocaust without Hitler.
No, because a Second World War was inevitable Hitler or no Hitler, and Hitler was fortunately a shitty strategist (refusing to withdraw German armies from encirclement, for example) who believed in his own genius over that of his generals to Germany’s cost and the Allies gain.
I also don’t think the Holocaust was something that can be 100% ascribed to Hitler either, in that it’s not like it was his idea alone and everybody just shrugged and went along with it, you still have the Heydrichs, the Himmlers, the Eichmanns, the ‘ordinary men’ who organized and performed the killings.
Also I don’t have it ‘in me’ to murder a kid even if it’s Hitler.
Since I realized that I wouldn’t exist if young Hitler had died, I have changed my answer to “No.” I’ve also started a new thread where people can explain how Hitler’s death would lead to their own non-existence.
If killing Hitler would mean a world where everything was gummy bears and unicorns (which it wouldn’t, humans still being humans), but one where I would no longer exist because of the non-meeting of my grandparents, or whatever (which doesn’t really follow, time travel logic-wise, although I’d turn into a living ontological paradox, no longer having a cause), I’d still kill Hitler. I don’t value my own life over preventing the suffering of millions.
But if you said that it would cause the non-existence of a person I love (I have someone in particular in mind), then… I’d certainly hesitate. I don’t think my brain is made for that kind of decision.
The buck ultimately stops with him, sure, but given how many wheels were in motion across the continent I have zero faith that simply removing Hitler solves the problem. I also have zero faith that an alternate leader of Germany wouldn’t go for something equally as horrific whilst being more competent, imagine someone like Heydrich as the Fuhrer for example.
In the end the most important thing about Hitler is that he lost, Nazism was totally crushed and is now reviled, so I’m not keen to re-roll the dice on that.
