In 1946, easy call. 1956, still probably a go. But in 2018? I’d be too afraid it would remove me or other people I care about from existence. KWIM?
When are you killing him, and where and when are the people you want to protect born? Also, how sensitive is your history function to perturbations?
I assume you’re worried about the butterfly effect, i.e. the sequence of events that are slightly changed that originally caused your ancestry line to exist? But if you were already an adult in 1946 (or 1956) it wouldn’t make a difference? I suppose that makes sense.
I’d also be concerned if swapping out Hitler for someone else would be a net positive. I mean, if I understand history correctly, he’s partly a symptom of deeper tensions and pressures, right? If you knocked him out before he rose to prominence you could end up with someone equally as authoritarian but perhaps slightly more skilled at objective military strategy. Or worse, let the pressures that perhaps WW2 alleviated build up until we have a WW2 once nuclear weapons are common place.
And it’s not like there was no good man in Germany at the time who could have led the country. Many Germans felt like their formerly great country had been brought nearly to ruin by outsiders and traitors, and Hitler seized the opportunity to promise to “clean house” and make the country great again. He was lying of course, but enough people believed the empty promises (and succumbed to the back-room political pressure) that he became the leader. If he hadn’t, who else might have?
Would the US have risen to superpower status if we never had to ramp up production to WW2 levels, and Europe was not bombed out? Not that I’m a great fan of US being a superpower, but it was something I was considering when watching a old movie where a fairly modern aircraft carrier somehow went back in time and potentially could stop the attack on Pear Harbor. Some interesting questions came up which I may start another thread on one day. But basically what would be their mission, should they stop the attack, or for the greater good of the country allow it as they knew how it would eventually play out - to the big advantage of the US military and the country? Also which president would be their commander in chief?
Who’s Kwim, and does she have a sister?
Those are the million (or trillion!) dollar questions. I would be most concerned about protecting people born in the 1970s or later. But my thought experiment was thinking about myself (or anyone reading) as an adult in whatever year you picture: 1946, 1956, etc.
On the last question, my gut sense is that it is much more sensitive than most people give it credit for. Not perhaps for broad patterns in culture and politics (although maybe more for that than people think), but certainly for who exactly gets born—just because the odds of one particular sperm getting to the egg are so low. If your parents had experienced exactly the same lives they did before you came along, except there was an extra mote of dust in the air one day a year or two before your birthdate that caused your dad to sneeze when he otherwise would not have, you are probably not you.
If you remove Hitler at any point in the timeline, you change the timeline. The results after that point can be rather unpredictable, as you are creating new options and new choices that will then shape the world from that point.
That’s why no Time Traveler has killed Hitler.
Because they would cease to exist the moment they did so, unraveling the world in which they existed, so then they never existed and never went back in time to kill Hitler. Effect destroys Cause, which destroys Effect.
Or, Scifi option B, that splits the timeline and we remain in the one where he wasn’t killed while the new timeline diverges.
I tend to see it as Option B, a multiverse situation. But so for my thought experiment, let’s stipulate that nothing you do can prevent your own birth or cause any other paradox, but when you jump “back”, it will be into the new, alternate timeline (meaning, I guess, another copy of you will still be there if you were born before the 1940s or if I’m wrong and you are born anyway).
Perhaps you haven’t considered the subtle dangers of time travel:
[
That’s what you think.
Myself, were I of a Hitler-killing bent, I would fire up the machine right now, drop in on him in his bunker five minutes before his alleged suicide, and get a little vengeance. You all just think he committed suicide, but actually there was a time traveler who just wanted a little personal satisfaction. He just staged the scene afterward to conform to history too to avoid paradoxing his trip out of existence.
Me, too. And I’d build the time machine to look like a human, and use compression fields to allow people to fit inside. And anyone inside who wasn’t wearing a special bracelet would be chased around by slow moving hovering drones who will calmly repeat over and over that they intend to kill them.
What about changing this up a little - what if instead of killing Hitler, you placed a different candidate for power into position? Someone with a national message that was more unifying and less “kill everyone who is Aryan” and “let’s take over Europe.” An inspirational leader - more like FDR say, rather than a psychopathic monster - who could lead his country forward out of the chaos created by WWI, negotiate better terms for recovery with the rest of the world, maybe participate with the West against Japan and Russian aggression in that version of WWII. Hitler never becomes anyone important.
How about that scenario?
Now you’ve got me curious about how somebody who was interested in taking over Europe but wasn’t all racist and genocidey and fascisty about it would be viewed today. Same exact military tactics, but no roundups, no concentration camps, no executions - and maybe even friendlier occupations. Presumably he’d still be driven back and defeated…or would he?
Except that WWII was born out of the asinine conditions levied upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, which put extraordinary restrictions on German industry and piled onerous ‘reparations’ on top of that. They were virtually impossible to repay and were intentionally crippling on the German economy. Well, then the Great Depression happened and everything fell to shit. There was no way Germany was going to be able repay anything, certainly no way they were going to be anything but an apocalyptic hellhole of a nation economically between the treaty conditions and the world wide economic conditions.
At some point it was going to blow up, no matter who was in charge and the Germans would want their revenge, as they did under Hitler.
Hah, the WikiHistory is very funny and on point.
Did Stewie end up being too sanguine in saying “nah, you can do whatever you want”?
Sounds kind of like Napoleon.
That’s one approach! Doesn’t save any Jews, Russians, Americans, or Brits, but hey.
That’s why I specified that he would have to be a unifying leader who could renegotiate better terms for the country, and bring hope again. I said like FDR. This leader works with other world leaders (to the extent possible in a time of international pressures to be isolationist) to effect global changes to help everyone through the Depression. Of course, his interest first is to Germany. End reparations! Rebuild! Jobs at home!
This point is not universally accepted by historians. This also assumes that the fault completely lies with the Allies, when the Germans had actually imposed harsher sanctions on the Russians in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.
I’m not going to get into a huge debate about this in this tread, simply pointing out that the idea that it was inevitable because of the Treaty of Versailles is not a forgone conclusion.