Some polls, I hesitate to think about but not this one. I would absoutely kill him in the cradle if I could.
Hitler diverted significant resources to killing Jews (and Gypsies, and others). I won’t say it cost him the war, but it didn’t help.
A recent op-ed piece by Timothy Snyder in the NY Times a week or so ago claimed that what Hitler held against the Jews was that they (okay, we) had invented ethics. That the only valid world-view was dog-eat-dog and he was the biggest alpha dog around.
It may sound callous, but that’s history. Either way, all those people are just as dead now from the war and its aftermath as they’d be had it been a non-stop lovefest since 1939. To me, it’s more or less academic, in that I didn’t suffer through it, and the world seems to be in a relatively good place now with respect to large wars and the like due to the outcome of WWII and the Cold War.
It’s entirely possible that the end of the cold war really did bring in some kind of Pax Americana where there won’t be large-scale total wars for a long time, and by killing Hitler, we avert WWII, only to have a larger, worse war some years later, with better technology.
Beyond that, how do we know that boy Hitler is necessarily going to go down the exact same path that the one in our timeline did? You’d basically be killing a child based on the possibility that he turns out a certain way. For all we know, there was some watershed event that turned him the way that he did, and that event could have gone any number of ways, one of which was the way it played out in our timeline.
Ultimately, if we’re killing a child, we’re killing an innocent, even if it is Boy Hitler.
So based on those two points, I say no, I wouldn’t kill Boy Hitler even if I had the chance.
The “Command and Conquer - Red Alert” computer game is based on just such a scenario. Hitler is killed while young but a Soviet Union rises up to start WW3 in the 1980’s.
Of course I would and with little to no hesitation except in the practical sphere such as disposing of the corpse.
What people are forgetting is that what happened in our world from the period of 1914 to 1945 was pretty much the worst case scenario possible-something that would have been the most horrible of dystopias to the perspective of an educated Edwardian. Anti-Semitism was absolutely a common phenomenon in Europe at the time, but the sort of genocidal anti-Semitism which Hitler enacted was something very much unique and a minority viewpoint prior to him even among anti-Semites. While obviously many others ended up participated in it, it was only under Hitler’s leadership this occurred considering in particular he was willing to divert resources from the war for this undertaking. Also people fail to see how horrible Hitler was even not accounting for the Holocaust. Despite his professed hatred for Bolshevism, Hitler’s endless wars of aggression against the rest of Europe allowed the breakout of Red Bolshevist totalitarianism out of its shell in the USSR into the heart of the continent. For that alone, Hitler was undoubtedly deserving of death.
I voted “No way” because it was the only option, but I want it noted I wouldn’t kill old Hitler, either.
A Canaanite might say he was jealous because they invented genocide.
Would I still be alive, as the original me, after I kill him and zoom back to today?
The first option should be running away with this.
Yeah, in every poll I’ve ever seen, there are those who agree with me, and there are idiots.
I sure would kill him. What seems weird about doing that comes from the unrealizably bizarre nature of the hypothetical. We aren’t very well equipped to deal with certain knowledge from the future about millions of deaths, but that doesn’t excuse us from doing so if somehow the option is plopped in front of us.
No, because I don’t buy the idea that Hitler was a unique evil genius personally responsible for the rise of the Third Reich and WW2. Given the circumstances of Germany after WW1, it was inevitable that a far-right political movement would have lots of popular support. There would almost certainly have been something like the National Socialist Party. Would things have gone differently if someone other than Hitler was at the helm? Probably; but no telling whether the net result would have been better or worse.
Well, I said upthread that killing Hitler results in a much bigger holocaust. Explain to me why I’m wrong.
This is right on target.
The real thing to do is not kill Hitler but to prevent the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. That would be an arguably good act that may have prevented WWI or greatly altered its course. Without WWI, you simply don’t have the conditions for Hitler to rise in the first place. He would have ended up a street painter or maybe a small-time political leader.
Sorry, but it is totally implausible in my view that the Holocaust could have happened without Hitler. The reason for that is that the Holocaust required both the will to commit genocide and WWII and Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, since most of the Jews killed were in the invaded territories. If Hitler is limited to just killing the Jews in Germany, I think that was about 500,000 people at the time. That would have been horrible and a “Holocaust” in its own right–but it would still pale in comparison to 6+ million.
I think WWII (the European war–the Pacific war is a whole other question) could have happened without Hitler, but it would not have been a National Socialist Germany doing the fighting, and it wouldn’t have had a nihilistic killer leading, most likely. I can see a nationalist Germany doing what Hitler did up to but not including Barbarosa, though I think the occupations would have been gentler, and such a Germany would have wanted to keep the Sudetenland, Austria, Luxembourg, Alsace, and a good chunk of Poland. I think things would have settled down and Germany might even have ended up keeping that territory for the long term.
A strong but sane Germany would have acted as a check on the Soviets next door. Without Barbarosa, Russia may have ended up less paranoid, and the worst aspects of the Cold War may have been averted. Further, without Barbarosa, Russia would probably have helped subdue Japan, bringing a quicker end to the Pacific War, quite possibly without the nuclear strikes.
The real horrors of WWII in Europe happened because Hitler invaded Poland and Russia with intention of removing/killing the population for Lebensraum. I think very few alternate WWII German leaders would have had the temerity/stupidity/evil to do this.
Because you are really bad at detecting sarcasm.
I said No. Not because I have an issue with him being a kid, but because I don’t know what would happen to the timeline.
Yeah, some bad shit happened but now, 70 years after WWII ended, things are pretty OK.
Remove Hitler from the equation as a child would that mean that WWII would never happen or would someone worse have got in power?
Would the holocaust not happen?
What changes would be made to the timeline, how would today be different?
I’m not convinced that there would be any significant benefits to killing him and that there wouldn’t be any significant detriments.
I’d extend that to at least 1955. Stalin’s murderous regime imposes puppet governments on Eastern Europe, China becomes Communist and starts killing people by the millions too, the British and French empires collapse, and after 1949 everyone expects an atomic war to break out at any time.
Guilty as charged! I confess I’m easily whooshed.
This, and I see them as intrinsically linked. IF someone could make a solid argument that killing Hitler would prevent or otherwise vastly reduce the death and destruction, a moral argument could be made that killing one kid is justified. However, it is, in my view, morally reprehensible to punish someone for something he hasn’t done, so it can only be done if there’s an even greater evil it will prevent. The thing is, it doesn’t seem to me that WW2 would likely have been prevented. It almost certainly still would have happened, and thus all we’re really asking is if the devil we know, Hitler, is worse than the devil we don’t. Sure, maybe the holocaust wouldn’t have happened if someone else took over, but maybe that person would have led the Nazis to victory in Europe or prolonged the war to cause more deaths. Or maybe war could have been completely avoided without him. We’re basically killing a person to roll a die with millions of lives at stake.
Moreso, though, even if we ignore the grandfather paradox (if we kill Hitler, then the new future wouldn’t have anyone to go back and kill him since they’d not even know who he was), we’d still have the butterfly effect. Since I think we’d mostly agree that WW2 was inevitable, what if it was delayed until a point when, not just the US, but maybe even the Russians, Germans, or other countries had developed nuclear weapons? WW2 could then have easily become the worst case scenario from the Cold War of mutually assured destruction. Or maybe that idea somehow prevents all out war then, but we end up with a significantly more complex and terrifying Cold War with multiple states pointing nukes at each other.
And none of that brings into account the possibility that maybe some really important historical figures might never have existed or perhaps some even more horrible person was prevented from existing as a result of these changes.
The variables are just WAY too difficult to predict for me to be willing to make such a drastic change in history. I might consider it IF we had a way of tightening it down significantly, but as that’s not part of this hypothetical. No.