Your assignment is to go back in time any year from 1889 until 1933 to stop Hitler from founding the Nazi Party and becoming Chancellor of Germany. The rules are:
you may not kill, maim or imprison him.
You must alter circumstances in Hitler’s actual, documented life.
The only sci-fi aspect to this assignment is your time machine. No 1920’s-style death rays are allowed. All the actions you take must rely on resources, persons and institutions that actually existed in Hitler’s lifetime.
Me, I’d go back to Linz in 1900, befriend the family and pay for him to take art lessons so that he’d be admitted to the art academy that he later applied to. In real life, the academy rejected him. The rejection embittered and infuriated him and did much to set him on his path of destructiveness. I’d stick around during his student years, buy his paintings, and help him establish himself as a professional artist. I would praise him extravagantly and bribe art critics to do likewise. I would convince him that politics is beneath the notice of a great painter such as himself. I’d find a pretty but impoverished Jewish or Gypsy girl, give her a generous dowry, and encourage him to marry her.
How about you? At what point in his life would you intervene?
Perhaps go back and give his father a job in a heavily jewish community so that he grew up surrounded by jews. It sounds like he didn’t become anti-semetic till later in life so an early start with jewish friends may have changed his path.
I would go back to his teenage years and introduce him to marijuana with the hope that he becomes a useless stoner. The two of us would get a happenin’ pad and just chill, dude.
If that didn’t work I would try to get him to travel out of the country on some adventure. I would flaunt my wealth and make up some elaborate story about how I attained it on some adventure to a pacific archipeligo, and He too could attain such wealth by following me.
I would find a tropical island paradise with friendly locals, but limited contact to the industrialized world, so I wouldn’t be killing him when I abandon him there. Then I would travel to the United States and meet my grandparents.
I dunno, man. Doesn’t an awful lot of alternative fiction that involves going back in time and stopping Hitler wind up having the Nazi Party being headed by a far more effective commander who actually succeeds in taking over Europe?
But if you’re going to toss me in the time machine forcibly, then I suppose I will try to change things by going to Germany in 1920 and hitting on his sister Paula. If a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a storm halfway around the world, then it’s just as likely that Adolf’s path could have been altered by me getting it on with her.
Travel to 1932.
Infiltrate the Stormtroopers.
Convince Ernst Roehm that Hitler wants him out of the way, and that the thing to do is to take a squad of his favorite buddy-boys, bump him off, and implicate Goering and Hess.* I set this up with the help of my DM1,000,000.
Without their charismatic leader, and riven by internal dissension, the Nazis do poorly in the 1932 general election.
*Nitpick: I don’t off Hitler; I convince Roehm to off him.
Getting him hooked on drugs comes to mind (Good ones like Heroin were around). If not that…maybe I could get some Hallucinogens (I notice you’re limiting the years in which I can time-travel, so if I can’t get some LSD in the present, I can’t go back to the late 60s and buy some legally. However, I don’t think you’ve prohibited me from going back to 1890 Texas and buying some Peyote.) Once I have said hallucinogens, I make a few temporal “hops” to dose Hitler every few months from his mid-childhood on up. He’ll almost certainly end up in an insane asylum. (A Victorian or Edwardian insane asylum, at that. Have a nice time, buddy.)
After that…kidnapping isn’t maiming, killing, or imprisoning* him is it? Well, what if baby Adolf is left as a foundling…for some nice Yanomami indian family.
*(I’m assuming your definition of “imprisoning” would be locking him extrajudicially in a dungeon somewhere just to get around the “no killing” clause.)
All of you are focusing on Hitler himself. The best way to stop Hitler would be to remove the conditions that led to WWII: Either stop the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, thus preventing WWI, or attempt to influence the Versailles negotiations to allow a peace that was less punitive towards Germany. I suspect the first might not be so easy–Europe was a powder keg, and Germany was looking for an excuse to expand, IIRC–so the better focus might be on the latter.
Alternatively, you could just try to help Germany win WWI… but that, of course, leaves the question of how the Allies would have reacted if -they- were the ones saddled with a Versailles-style treaty.
I will take your unlimited funds in US dollars and pay off the war debt of the Weimar Republic. Germany will not be influenced by Hitler and he will not rise to power.
I think this has been done before. You need a high-powered rifle, a good camera and three confederates. An expert photographer, and mother with a baby or even a baby doll wearing blue clothes.
Go to rally that Hitler will address, and hide in a balcony. After Hitler speaks squeeze off one shot that lands close to Hitler, but does not strike him. Then have the female confederate hand the baby to Hitler so he can use it as a shield.
Make sure your photographer gets a couple of good shots [with the camera] of Hitler using the baby as a shield for all the newspapers. Jump into your time machine [with the photographer if necessary] before the SA gets a couple of good shots at you. Hitler then eats his gun about 13 years ahead of schedule.
While you are in 1932 head on over to Moscow with your rifle and take out another madman who probably murdered more than Hitler.
Then head to the U.S., find Will Rogers and advise against flying with Wiley Post.
I’d go back in time and use all of my knowledge on how to rule Germany myself, but this time, they’d win. I’d make Hitler some kind of janitor or something.
(Is that cheating?)
