My take is that a more competent German leader would see those 500K Jewish Germans as potential soldiers, scientists and workers and would have put those SS dickheads on the front lines. The whole Nazi repression stuff absorbed huge amounts of wealth and manpower. A guy like Heydrich might have won the war first and done the killing later.
I went with option 3 and screw your Rule #1 ------ a very positive maybe. There was going to be a Nazi Party anyway and possibly others like it. Who is to say that we wouldn’t have ended up with a Goring, Himmler or Rohm as leader and the ultimate power in Germany? Could one of them have been worse? What if the Communists had gained control? The “devil I know” is the worse I can imagine but ------- is he the worst there could have been.
Well quite, if he does thought the situation might end up worse which is my point, it’s like playing Russian Roulette with an unknown number of bullets loaded into an unknown number of chambers, when the stakes are not only your own life.
If we could jump back and forward I’d say fill your boots, but I’m assuming the OP means this is a one-time deal, once you’ve killed Hitler you’re stuck with whatever results from it. Though why restrict yourself to Hitler? If the time jump is a one time thing and you’re comfortable with the idea why not get serious and draw up a hitlist, selected on the basis of complicity in the Holocaust and role in Germany’s war effort? Yeah I know, fighting the hypothetical, bad!
I always answer this question from the young kids in bars the same way. Of course, I would kill him, but it wouldn’t stop the holocaust.
And it wouldn’t. If you’ve got time, google Heimrich Himmler.
But if we take Hitler out of the picture and no one else who had the charisma or the popularity to take his place? Schleicher? Do you think he would have wanted, or the Wehrmacht allowed, war? I know the big man view of history isnt a popular one. But I see no other Hitlers on the horizen. Its an easy call IMO. Take out Hitler and the Nationalist side of the German political equation becomes as fragmented as the Socialist/Communist side.
Remember too that the person who would have taken Hitlers place would have needed to be able to marshal the political power to change the Weimar Constitution. The only other political force in Germany who would have wished that were the Communists.
No offense at all meant to the OP, but I can’t help reading this in a cartoony German accent.
Although I guess Hitler wouldn’t say “please”.
This is just silly. Himmler would never have been in a position of power without Hitler. He had neither the charisma nor ability to lead. Also, check out the paper I linked above. He didnt look to happy about being ordered to begin the Holocaust. The Holocaust could only happen in the anarchy that was Nazi Germany and under the fog of war in the East. And those conditions were only possible under Hitler.
The gun-type bomb is quite simple. They dropped it without testing and it worked perfectly. Once the science of nuclear physics was known, nuclear power and nuclear weapons were obvious developments that someone would have pursued sooner or later.
They tested it first:
The idea that Germany needed one strong leader rather than a weak and corrupt democracy, one Fuhrer for one people, wasn’t Hitler’s idea alone - later of course he became convinced that he should be said leader. There were plenty of nationalists around to grab on to that idea and fill the niche, maybe someone who was a complete unknown in OTL who like Hitler would find a ‘calling’ absent the presence of Hitler to do it, though if you want to say none of them have the same charisma as Hitler that’s a fair point. On the other hand, it wasn’t just Hitler’s charisma that lead to the Third Reich, I wouldn’t want to gamble on how large a part it was though.
No, thirdname is right. The Trinity test was of the much less certain implosion design for the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima was not tested.
Thats fair enough.
Ignorance fought. 
My point was Himmler, plenty of other like minded SS and a couple centuries of anti-semitism, the holocaust would still happen without any Hitler. Smaller or larger scale we don’t and won’t know. And the paper above wouldn’t effect my family. My grandparents were already here in the U.S. and my parents were born.
Someone may have already covered this:
No, for two reasons. One, killing an innocent kid is just wrong, no if ands or buts.
Two, Hitler may have been the face of the Nazis, but he was not the sole driving force behind them. As I see it, if Hitler was never Hitler, someone else would have been. The Nazis would still have taken power, WWII would still be fought, and the Holocaust would still happen.
Absolutely, no question. Maybe the Holocaust wasn’t Hitler’s idea alone, but c’mon, it’s Hitler.
I simply disagree with this. Its debatable that the antisemitism was worse in Germany than in the East and, save for a few bloody pogroms there, there was no Holocaust. The Holocaust was very time and situation specific. The Germans were trying to get rid of its Jews prewar but hardly anyone would allow them to immigrate…including us. And the British wouldnt allow them to go to Palestine.
The Holocaust needed the lawlessness that was Nazi Germany to flower.
Just found an interesting in depth interview with historian Sir Ian Kershaw:
http://ww2history.com/experts/Sir_Ian_Kershaw/Hitler_and_the_Holocaust
He addresses many Holocaust related topics. A very good read.
It’s an interesting timey-wimey moral question whether you’re innocent or guilty of crimes you’re going to commit in the future (and I’m sure glad we’re limiting that question to time travel, and not extending it into, say, psychological profiling).
If I was allowed to fight the hypothetical, maybe I would try to reform Little Hitler. Instead of killing him, could I just sodomize him a bit? And take pictures, and then distribute them to his friends and family? He’d be too traumatized to ever have a career in politics.
Joking about sodomizing a child is OK if the child is Hitler, right? I mean, if child *murder *is on the table…
Do we get a quick view of Germany 1930-1950 after we kill the little snot?
If we get an even worse outcome:
- Germany is clever enough to disguise their atomic bomb program and gets it in 1940 and still starts taking over the world.
- The US is gripped by a massive Pacifist Movement and sits out the war (Star Trek (Original) did this - Kirk ensures the death of the person who would have created the movement)
- Japan and Germany attack the US Navy on both oceans - and this time, they go after the carriers, not the battleships
4
5
6
Do we get to go back and stop ourselves from killing him?
Well remember also that Hitler killed off many of his rivals so we dont know if one of those could have been a “rising star” so to speak and taken his place.