A while back there was a meme going around of time travelers going back and killing Hitler. Others would have to go back to reset the timeline because things got much worse. Are there other stories or novels that touch on this theme?
I recall a time travel story where someone killed a German leader because he would have instituted an economic policy that extended the Depression, and it’s not like a different leader could have done anything worse. Who’s this Hitler guy, anyway?
I recall another where in order to prevent WWII and the rise of Hitler, time travelers manipulated events so Germany won WWI…and at the end of the story realize that all they did was ensure the rise of a French equivalent of Hitler.
James P. Hogan wrote a short story where a time travelers goes back to kill Hitler, and is promptly detained by German security who are very confused why all these weird people from the future showed up to kill such an enlightened leader. Then when he does kill Hitler and is shot in return, the last thing he sees is the Germans talking about how “they’ll have to use the double”, even if he is unstable…
Another Hitler variation
In the video game series Command & Conquer Red Alert, in Red Alert 1 it starts with Albert Einstein in 1949 inventing a time machine and going back in time to 1923 and killing Hitler before he became a name, which leads to the Nazi party eventually disbanding. This overwrites our WW2 timeline but Einstein is fine with this as his reality fades away because he thinks this will end all the bloodshed of the 20th century.
However this just leads to World War 2 just being delayed, with it starting in 1949 when Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union invades Eastern Europe and rolls right across to France wanting a totally Communist Europe and destroying everything in his wake. Eventually the Western Allies (in this case most of Europe including the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Greece) with the help of new allies including the United States push back the Soviets though the Soviets practice scorched earth all the way until the final showdown in Moscow where Stalin is killed. The war winds up being much more destructive than our WW2 with over 100 million killed in Europe alone.
Of course the further games make the world even worse, in Red Alert 2 with Stalin dead the Allies put a puppet Communist government in charge of Russia lead by a surviving Romanov. However he’s actually sympathetic to the former Communist government and eventually rebuilds the Soviet military and invaded the United States itself in the 1970s blaming them for its loss in WW2 and this World War 3 also leads to heavy death and destruction until the Soviets again are defeated by the Allies quickly sieging and destroying Moscow via this world’s Albert Einstein developing teleportation technology.
Then Red Alert 3 comes around, taking place at the end of WW3 in 1976, the Soviets in a last gasp invent a time machine to kill Albert Einstein himself blaming him for inventing nuclear weapons and the teleportation technology. So they kill Einstein in the 1920s too, come back and find themselves winning World War 3 since the Allies lack the teleportation technology to go directly to the Soviet capital and have to fight the much harder way which can’t fight the Soviet Unions sheer numbers. Of course then no nukes means nobody nuked the Japanese in WW2, so a reborn Japanese Empire decides to attack the Soviets Eastern flank when they’re occupied with Europe which now just extends their version of World War 3 further.
So in short summary, Einstein using a time machine to kill Hitler leads to a much worse World War 2 and eventually even a World War 3.
While I don’t think it’s one of his best works, Neal Stephenson’s The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. qualifies. It’s about the creation of a time travel technique designed to give the USA a subtle advantage via changed history but those involved have a different agenda. (simplified for spoilers).
Making History, by Stephen Fry, does a variant with the protagonist and his helper able to send objects back in time, so they choose to put a male contraceptive in the Hitler family’s drinking water before Adolf’s conception. This does not go according to their plans, since the role Hitler played in our timeline gets filled by a smarter, more rational, more controlled charismatic sociopath.
You probably mean this:
Alao, Stephen King’s 11/22/63 probably counts as an example.
My own story, “Saving Hitler” in Space and Time magazine, has someone going back to keep Hitler from being killed in WWI.
Fritz Leiber’s “Try and Change the Past,” and Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Muhammed,” both show that you can’t achieve your time travel objectives.