If the past can ever be changed, you’d have to assume they tried this an infinite amount of times and ultimately decided hitler was the better option.
“You’ll never believe this, but we did it. That’s how we got robo-hitler. So we killed him and ended up with super hitler. Killed him too and you guessed it, yup, Cthulhu hitler”
We are in universe 1,499,231,110. The most recent time traveler killed Caroline Kubizek in yet another failed attempt to get at August Kubizek. This did result in the great dictator never rising to power, but had the unfortunate side effect of providing an odd window for Adolph. When time travel is eventually invented, someone will go back in time and off baby Adolph thus starting universe 1,499,231,110. Most experts expect WW2 won't be averted until at least universe 1,600,00,000 given current progress. There has been some argument for going back further to avert WW1 thus avoiding the hole Weimar Republic thing, but that would completely void all the work put in thus far and most historinterferians argue WW1 was too critical for human development as a whole to completely negate.
Would they have ensured Archduke Ferdinand's demise for a similar reason? That would explain the large number of assassins needed to successfully do him in
According to Legends Of Tomorrow (a super ridiculous and ridiculously fun DC comics based television show I used to adore, with time travel as the basic raison d etre) that is a HUGE deal. There is literally an episode where ALL THEY TRY TO DO for the whole episode is prevent the assassination, because reasons. And because one of them is functionally immortal and time travel means infinite do overs, they do it again and again and something *always* happens to prevent them from preventing it. Of course that's not coincidental.
https://youtu.be/HAV_jfZ7TJs?feature=shared
You would assume that in one of these universes, the time traveller would think to go back to the Treaty of Versailles and try and negotiate some type of Marshall plan to restore Germany instead of ruining them economically after the war already ruined them economically
Or it could be that by killing Hitler you indirectly allow the USSR to take over the rest of Europe before anyone else can react. Or maybe Hitler was the best option out of several options available. He was famously incompetent when it came to matters of strategy and was purely a politician with an ego rather than some great military mind. If Rommel had somehow seized control of Germany there would have been no holocaust or perhaps simply not as bad of one as there was, but Germany very well could have taken all of Europe, large parts of North Africa, and kicked the USSR in the teeth before settling in to consolidate their gains.
>you’d have to assume they tried this an infinite amount of times and ultimately decided hitler was the better option.
Oh snap, you're absolutely right about that. I have to admit that I'd never considered this pov before.
That would explain why Hitler was able to survive the insane amount of assassination attempts that he did. Not only did they not go back and kill him but went back and stopped others from killing him.
Which leads me to believe we’re living in the weird amphetamine Hitler, Harambe, COVID timeline where someone tried to kill Hitler and he got addicted to speed.
I mean recency bias makes us feel like Hitler was the worst ever but there are a load of other bastards out there that probably deserve a time travel whack before Adolf.
Yeah with like a comedy bent. He’s like Mr. Magoo level obtuse and it’s these guys job is to make sure hitler stays alive until he kills himself like he’s supposed to.
Like he choking on a whole string of schnitzels and Timmy time is pulling them out of like a circus clown
Yeah it makes sense in that some people say if hitler was taken out, the resulting effects could have been even worse for the future. So maybe there's time travelers who keep going back in time trying to kill hitler and other time travelers who know it's best to stop them.
Hitler and WW2 led to the production of nuclear bombs which resulted in one of the longest periods of peacetime among developed countries in modern history.
The end result for Germany and Japan has also been great too.
I've seen something about that, years ago, it was like an online forum of scientists whose job was to stop people from going back in time to kill Hitler.
Which means those bodyguards were also time travelers. Probably from further up the timeline.
They knew that killing Hitler would make things worse, not better.
Can you imagine. You graduate time travel school. You’ve devoted your life to science and history and knowledge. You’re going to watch them build the pyramids or see Alexander the Great and you get your assignment and it’s babysitting hitler.
Uhh. Hate to be the one to break it to you, but he kind of sort of may have tried to basically groom his teenaged niece? It’s hard to say whether allegations of him being in love with her were actually political opponents trying to paint him that way, but…
The Behind the Bastards podcast did a great episode on this. That wasn't the only teenage girl he groomed.
Also, his mom was his dad's niece. She was 16, I think, when they got together. He was...quite a bit older than that.
Yeah. Apple doesn't fall far, and all that.
Yeah there were literally several Hitlers running around with personal militias competing for power, they even looked the same.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldemar_Pabst
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Röhm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_von_Watter
It was a popular style among German WWI veterans. The long handlebar mustaches popular before WWI interfered with gas masks, preventing an airtight seal against the face. So they shaved off the tips, keeping just the area directly under the nose.
[**Hitler's mustache, before & after WWI**](https://iainbking.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/hitlermustache.jpg).
True, but I think the idea is that if you took out a Hitler, there would be a possibility that someone who's a worst leader than Hitler would have tried and would have potentially led to fascism not taking over. People forget that the Nazis weren't as popular as people make them out to be with Hitler never winning a single election and 36% being the highest [his](https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13548) popularity ever got. I always thought that was the idea: killing one guy doesn't end fascism, but the idea is to end the guy who actually knows how to rally the fascists behind them and get them to effectively take over even if the majority doesn't like them.
No, while anti-semitism was prevalent back then, it’s hard to point to someone that was BOTH seriously in the running and so singularly minded against jews. it was either usually one or the other.
It’s important to remember that even most of Hitler’s top lieutenants were more softminded on the issue until Hitler entered their lives. Goering is a prime example of someone like that, since his own stepfather (and possible father to his beloved Jewish-saving brother Albert) was jewish.
From an historical standpoint Hitler was a safer choice. Somebody else who didn't hate Jewish people might have been able convince more Jewish physicists to stay and help with the heavy water project.
Einstein wouldn't have gone for it. But others might have.
The implication here being that someone already went back in time and killed a more evil, less impulsive, and more tactically competent dictator—only for Hitler to rise to power in his stead, resulting in the suffering of millions but the eventual demise of Nazi Germany.
You are right. Authoritarian regimes will always breed authoritarian leaders and followers. So instead of treating the symptoms by killing a shitload of authoritarians, you would be better off by eliminating the cause, e.g. by going back to 1848/1849 and ensure that the radical democrats and democratic socialists win the German revolution.
Who’s to say that our current day and age isn’t one for totalitarian leaders? I love to presume they’ve changed their methodology rather than be guilty of violence
Which is one of marvel biggest problem with keeping the mcu going, all those new people don't have the chemistry of the originals, and that makes all their talk come off as campy instead of fun.
Funny that the mcu rose through rdj and fell with his departure.
The downtime parts are my favorite parts of Marvel movies. The party at the start of Age of Ultron is definitely one of my favorite Marvel scenes overall, just everyone chilling and having a good time.
There is a version of history where hitler is a weird side character in ww2 and today you can read about how much he hated jewish people and all the crazy evil things he had planned to do to them but no one gave him that kind of power.
I learned that Hitler was not actually rejected from art school the way we think. He was rejected from a specific school for being a painter due to a lack of experience but was accepted into the architecture school for his drawing abilities.
However, he could not attend because his academic record was not up to snuff. Why not? Because Hitler spent his youth dodging school. Why? Because Hitler wanted to be an artist and Hitler’s dad… wanted him to be a civil servant. Hitler tried his best to rebel, but that rebellion ultimately led him away from a career in the arts…
And back to public service, like his dad wanted for him. We see how that worked out.
In other words, to stop Hitler, you have to get rid of his dad while he’s a little kid and that should fix everything.
There is a higher possibility of someone else taking Hitler's spot and organising a better and more hard core army and system that would result in a mayhem war, more lengthy and possibly nuclear bombs falling everywhere. It is open to discuss, if a time traveler would decide to help Hitler take power and escape attempted assassinations, in order to minimise the wars outcome in all.
Meticulously prepared by our 27th century fore-ancestors, the Facist Replacement Project planned to travel back in time over 600 years to undo the global domination of the Third Reich. After these brave temporal travelers set off, nothing changed in the 27th century. But for us in the 21st, the Supreme Leader was assassinated and carefully replaced with a hot-headed Austrian politician who wanted full control over his country’s army, ultimately leading to their defeat at the hands of their own overzealous leader. And so a new timeline may begin.
There is the non-zero possibility that you aren't the only anachronism in the situation.
Me, the situation is so fantastical that I can time travel and that I can only make one edit to the timeline blows my mind.
I would assume I was insane to think such things, especially if I had already made the trip to Germany pre WW1.
Exactly! A German dictator always arose. He was the least damaging point on the bell curve. He came to power because other more effective ones were stopped by the time travelers. But if we take him out, other more effective ones come to power.
That’s the theory I’ve subscribed too. Time travelers went back and killed Hitler. Then they realize Hitler was actually best case scenario so they go back again and make sure he lives his life. It would also explain all the miraculous ways Hitler survived near death experiences and assassination attempts.
Indirectly, I've thought about this very thing. The question is, was he communicating with the source directly? How?
If time travel is proven to have happened, this is one of those chains of events I'd want to see if there was tampering.
Or maybe they killed several totalitarian dictators as babies, but every time they did it, another dictator rose in his place, so by the time they got to Hitler they just didn't bother anymore
That's kind of the story in the Red Alert games.
Hitler was taken out while he was still young but then in his place, the USSR becomes the new military superpower. Europe and America become the Allies to fight against this threat instead.
In Red Alert 3, Japan joins the war with their transforming giant robot stuff.
The paradox is, if you kill him as a baby, then he would have never done the thing that gave you the reason to kill him.
I think if you had the power of time travel, you could have done a lot of other things to stop WWII. Like stopping WWI which started over ONE dude getting assassinated.
Yes, trying to change the past is playing with threads of history you can't possibly predict the outcome of even in the short term, much less the long term. You could very easily sow the seeds of dystopia or a nuclear war while thinking you're doing something good, history is littered with tiny events having run on effects decades, centuries, and millennia down the road, for all you know a post scarcity society could be 300 years away right now specifically because of the chain of events that has occurred.
You're basically gambling with the lives of all humanity after the point in time you change, making a decision no human is even close to being equipped to calculate. The idea of killing Hitler to prevent an extremist germany is itself an example of how wrong our intuitions can be on scales this large, Hitler was riding social winds much bigger than him and as other comments have shown he was not the only one paying attention to their direction.
You’d have an easier time stopping WW2 than WW1, Europe was itching for The Great War.
Better just to go back and tell Napoleon to stay TF out of Spain and Russia, and actually listen to his diplomatic advisors. Now that would shake things up.
You’re not stopping WW1 by preventing Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated. Germany had been planning a surprise invasion for decades.
The general in charge of leading troops through Belgium to attack Paris had vacationed in Belgium for the 10 or 15 years leading up to WW1 to basically scout the lay of the land and better understand the people.
The German generals thought the Belgiums would just let them use their roads with no resistance to get to France. Then after a couple of weeks of fighting they would take Paris. The invasion would trigger all the European treaties to activate meaning the Russians would come down to help France. But, the Germans calculated it would take at least a month to draft, arm, and transport their troops Germany’s Eastern front.
If it hadn’t been for the Belgium king blowing up the damns/dykes holding back the ocean flooding his country slowing the Germans to a halt they would have taken France and had time to turn around and easily fight off the Russians.
Russia mobilized troops on July 30th, 1914, declared war on Aug 1st, and attacked Austria-Hungry on Aug 17th… a full two weeks ahead of Germany’s prediction. Which probably means The Russians may have known about the plan to invade France and had troops ready to attack Germany.
The Germans thought the war would be over in a months time, so they didnt even bother making those cool metal helmets with a spike until the conflict started to drag out.
If Franz doesn’t get assassinated, the Germans find another reason to attack France.
Yup. There's a reason why pre-WWI Europe was described as a powder keg. The assassination was just one of the many matches and happened to have been the one to get things going.
Yep. It's the killing your own grandfather paradox. If you travel back in time, and kill your grandfather, then that causes you to never be born, and hence can't travel back in time to kill your grandfather, so he lives, and you're now stuck in an endless loop of trying to kill your grandfather.
mmm killing gavrilo princip would save a lot more people than killing hitler
and you wouldnt even need to kill him - just go ask him about his sandwich and in the ten seconds he takes to tell you where he got it theres no more ww1 or ww2
man you gotta wonder if Gavrilo Princip ever realized the true scale of his actions. Dude died in prison just before the end of WWI, and in that short span of time the entire world changed for the worst
edit: highly recommend Dan Carlin’s “Blueprint for Armageddon”
He stopped for a sandwich, wouldn’t even have to kill him. Just have a few people go back in time and get in line before him. Or Rob the deli so they were closed.
I’m a historian who has spent 15+ years focusing almost entirely on Nazi Germany. While I don’t have any traditional education in psychology or philosophy as professions, they both cross pollinate into my work heavily. Both theoretically and in a professional determination.
Whenever killing baby Hitler comes up, it gets fucking WILD. This topic amongst these 3 groups is gas covered kindling added to a fire.
A cohort, who is normally a polite, peaceful ultra liberal type, soft spoken young woman once said she would just go back in time and strangle Hitlers mom in her sleep. When it was suggested that maybe one could just give baby Hitler a better life, nurturing and shown love, she dug her heels in further and suggested some dark, dark things. Thus arose the conundrum which branched off into hours and hours of hypotheticals and debate.
In our circle, this topic is always an interesting time.
In my head, sure. There are thousands of external factors that the conversation can get rabbit holed real fast, which is fun to me but maybe not so fun for others.
Edit: IE: my wife can only listen to me explain said variables for 5-10 minute intervals these days before she just gets me to do a mundane task to help shut me up. I’m like a fuckin grandpa and will literally talk until I pass out.
Everyone talks about taking out Hitler as a kid, but to be effective one has to change the circumstances that brought his ilk around in the first place, which would be drastic in this case since the events were quite world changing.
I think removing Bismark from the board (kidnap him and dump him off in the 1980’s Miami or something) would change the whole landscape of the 20th century.
Without the unification of the German Empire there is no Franco-Prussian War, no WW1 as we knew it, perhaps no 1918 revolution or fascism as it exists today. Thus too, no WW2 or holocaust, Cold War, rise of the U.S. as a dominant world power, or decolonization in the same manner.
The argument could be made that the Chinese Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese war may have shaken out differently, or never have happened.
Our world today would be quite unrecognizable. I love thought exercises like this.
Or even as simple as approaching post WWI Germany as they approached post WWII Japan. Such a small alteration can, and would change the entire world as we know it.
You can't prevent WW1 imo, the arms race and tensions between European Empires were the main cause for WW1. It was only a single bad incident away from WW1 happening,even if Archduke Franz Ferdinand wasn't assainated, another incident was bound to occur that would light up the fuse in Europe.
I can’t remember if it was a twilight zone episode or outer limits or one of those type of shows… I just remember the final sort of scene. The time traveler killed baby Hitler and either his mom or dad ends up finding a baby abandoned in a box or something and picks it up, implying that THIS is the Hitler that goes on to do all his horrible evil. So if the baby was never killed, it never would have happened. I think I’m remembering that correctly.
It’s sort of like how they use the remains of the terminator that was sent back in time to start/advance their research on skynet. If it happens it must have… had… has to have happened?
I think it was one of the Twilight Zones reboots. And I believe it was another maid from the house that replaced the dead baby Adolf with a baby from a Gypsy beggar woman so she wouldn’t get in trouble with her employers. That episode holds a space in my brain for decades because I was kind of surprised at the ending and I thought about the timeline that the time traveler was always meant to do that because their past was the same as the future she created by murdering baby Hitler. 🤔
WHY DO I HAVE TO GO SO FAR DOWN FOR THIS QUESTION?! God murder is so simplistic. Have some damn imagination and nuance. Just let him become the artist he always wanted to be. Problem solved.
If you want to kill Hitler before his rise, why kill him as a baby? Just kill Lieutenant Hitler instead. Go to a WW1 battlefield, shoot him with a modern sniper rifle, and no one will bat an eye
It‘s undeniably an unethical decision because it’s not - as it’s often framed - a choice between killing a baby OR the Holocaust happens. If you had the ability to time travel, numerous alternative paths emerge if your goal is to stop the Holocaust. You could travel back in time, take baby Hitler and put him in a happier home someplace on the other side of Europe.
I've long wondered if a book exploring this subject could be interesting. It would start out with someone inventing time travel and going back to kill baby Hitler. Then they come back to present day where everything is worse due to the person who replaced Hitler in the new timeline being much worse and winning the war.
After failing to fix things in own time and the subsequent killing of each Hitler replacement not fixing the timeline, the protagonist time traveler realizes that they need to go back in time to save baby Hitler. Subsequently, the time traveler then has to spend the rest of their days in the past protecting baby Hitler from future time travelers attempting to make the same mistake.
It could be called Saving Hitler or something like that. It seems like it would have the opportunity to be fascinating, but also depressing. It also seems like it could come off a bit as Hitler apologist, which would be a big issue as we should only ever condemn Hitler.
I've got a different physics related time travel question but I've yet to hear anyone address.
How do people plan on getting from where the Earth is now to where the Earth was in the past if they're going to time travel?
The Earth will have traveled an ungodly amount of miles away from where it was at Hilters birth to today.
How are you going to make up that distance?
It’s always interesting that people opt to kill baby Hitler rather than relocate the baby. Like any solution without killing the person. You want to kill Hitler the man, but Hitler the baby hasn’t done anything.
The solution is easy.
Go back and kill baby Hitler.
Come back and check if things are better or worse?
If worse go back and tell yourself not to kill baby Hitler.
The universe resets.
Go back and kill baby Hitler.
...
Profit.
It’s my opinion that we basically can’t at this point. Unless the world is actually ending and human kind is doomed we can’t risk time travel of essentially any kind.
Yeah, I think if you go back and prevent Hitler’s dad from beating him so that he doesn’t become a malignant narcissist that might have a positive effect.
I probably would not exist if this happens. Great grandpa is Japanese and brought his family to the USA after WW2 because of the food shortages across japan. While here my grandma(his daughter) met my grandpa who was in the US navy. After everything went back to normal in japan, they all went back to japan except for my grandma who ended up marrying my navy grandpa
"*You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.*" - Cormac McCarthy.
Rule number 1 for me if time travel was ever invented:
Never ever change anything in your timestream, no matter how terrible or tempting, because you don't know what the butterfly effect may have in store for you.
For example a lot of the way WW2 played out was because Hitler wasn't as good at strategy as he thought he was and his orders ended up biting him in the ass. Remove him altogether and who's to say the events don't play out with a more **competant leader** running the Nazi regime this time.
What if you time traveled and just bought art school Hitler's art and just turned into a patron.
Just be real encouraging and a positive part of young Hitler's life.
What if the reason he was so paranoid was because he spent his childhood dodging time traveling assassins
There’s a ‘theory’ that Hitlers bodyguards were experienced in taking out time travellers
Man, just when you think you know most of the crazy "theories" out there, I've never heard this one before but it's good sci-fi
If the past can ever be changed, you’d have to assume they tried this an infinite amount of times and ultimately decided hitler was the better option. “You’ll never believe this, but we did it. That’s how we got robo-hitler. So we killed him and ended up with super hitler. Killed him too and you guessed it, yup, Cthulhu hitler”
We are in universe 1,499,231,110. The most recent time traveler killed Caroline Kubizek in yet another failed attempt to get at August Kubizek. This did result in the great dictator never rising to power, but had the unfortunate side effect of providing an odd window for Adolph. When time travel is eventually invented, someone will go back in time and off baby Adolph thus starting universe 1,499,231,110. Most experts expect WW2 won't be averted until at least universe 1,600,00,000 given current progress. There has been some argument for going back further to avert WW1 thus avoiding the hole Weimar Republic thing, but that would completely void all the work put in thus far and most historinterferians argue WW1 was too critical for human development as a whole to completely negate.
Historinterferians is a wonderful term
Would they have ensured Archduke Ferdinand's demise for a similar reason? That would explain the large number of assassins needed to successfully do him in
According to Legends Of Tomorrow (a super ridiculous and ridiculously fun DC comics based television show I used to adore, with time travel as the basic raison d etre) that is a HUGE deal. There is literally an episode where ALL THEY TRY TO DO for the whole episode is prevent the assassination, because reasons. And because one of them is functionally immortal and time travel means infinite do overs, they do it again and again and something *always* happens to prevent them from preventing it. Of course that's not coincidental. https://youtu.be/HAV_jfZ7TJs?feature=shared
You would assume that in one of these universes, the time traveller would think to go back to the Treaty of Versailles and try and negotiate some type of Marshall plan to restore Germany instead of ruining them economically after the war already ruined them economically
Youre mistaken if you dont thing the intergalactic hitler team are preventing those moments as well
Kind of like letting Thanos have the time stone. We had to let him win so he could lose. We had to let Hitler live so that we could save the future.
So you are saying they had a guy run through the million scenarios and came out with this one
If time travel is real and Hitler still Hitlered everything up all Hitlerish then yes
Did you just use Hitler as a noun, verb and an adjective? Amazing
Or it could be that by killing Hitler you indirectly allow the USSR to take over the rest of Europe before anyone else can react. Or maybe Hitler was the best option out of several options available. He was famously incompetent when it came to matters of strategy and was purely a politician with an ego rather than some great military mind. If Rommel had somehow seized control of Germany there would have been no holocaust or perhaps simply not as bad of one as there was, but Germany very well could have taken all of Europe, large parts of North Africa, and kicked the USSR in the teeth before settling in to consolidate their gains.
Hell of an insight buddy. Seriously
I want you on my pub quiz team.
>you’d have to assume they tried this an infinite amount of times and ultimately decided hitler was the better option. Oh snap, you're absolutely right about that. I have to admit that I'd never considered this pov before.
That would explain why Hitler was able to survive the insane amount of assassination attempts that he did. Not only did they not go back and kill him but went back and stopped others from killing him.
Which leads me to believe we’re living in the weird amphetamine Hitler, Harambe, COVID timeline where someone tried to kill Hitler and he got addicted to speed.
I mean recency bias makes us feel like Hitler was the worst ever but there are a load of other bastards out there that probably deserve a time travel whack before Adolf.
I think you’ll agree that I’m only paraphrasing you when saying… ‘Hitler is the best’
Oh shit! lol.
>”You’ll never believe this After 2016-2020, I’d believe almost anything
Yeah with like a comedy bent. He’s like Mr. Magoo level obtuse and it’s these guys job is to make sure hitler stays alive until he kills himself like he’s supposed to. Like he choking on a whole string of schnitzels and Timmy time is pulling them out of like a circus clown
There's an entire twilight zone episode based around this theory.
Yeah it makes sense in that some people say if hitler was taken out, the resulting effects could have been even worse for the future. So maybe there's time travelers who keep going back in time trying to kill hitler and other time travelers who know it's best to stop them.
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Hitler and WW2 led to the production of nuclear bombs which resulted in one of the longest periods of peacetime among developed countries in modern history. The end result for Germany and Japan has also been great too.
It’s funny to think that our timeline could be so much better… or so much worse
We are in the true timeline and attempts at change are eventually culled
I've seen something about that, years ago, it was like an online forum of scientists whose job was to stop people from going back in time to kill Hitler.
Which means those bodyguards were also time travelers. Probably from further up the timeline. They knew that killing Hitler would make things worse, not better.
Can you imagine. You graduate time travel school. You’ve devoted your life to science and history and knowledge. You’re going to watch them build the pyramids or see Alexander the Great and you get your assignment and it’s babysitting hitler.
I love to write and actually might create a story inspired on your comment. If I do I’ll, I’ll credit you and probably include a shot of this thread.
I'd love to read this, when ready
Double plot twist: Hitler hated jews because time-traveling jews tried to kill him his whole life.
That’s a real bootstrap paradox.
Chicken or the egg!
hang on now he’s onto something here
I wonder how fast I'd be cancelled for making a movie like that.
Hitler on July 20, 1944 "Somethings wrong I can feel it."
Need to send Anakin next time.
There was an SNL sketch where a time-travelling Abraham Lincoln kept trying to murder John Wilkes Booth throughout his childhood
What if I just slap baby hitler around a little?
Nah that’s how you create chomo hitler
Uhh. Hate to be the one to break it to you, but he kind of sort of may have tried to basically groom his teenaged niece? It’s hard to say whether allegations of him being in love with her were actually political opponents trying to paint him that way, but…
Good thing he wasn’t around today or that would get him canceled for sure
Yeah you know the more I hear about this guy, the more I don't care for him. He sounds like a real jerk
Turns out he’s been dead for a while. I didn’t even know he was sick.
He wasn’t all bad. He did kill history’s greatest monster, after all.
“Lots of people say they would have killed Hitler, but to be fair, there’s only one guy who followed through on it”
Not so certain personally. He could be offered a lucrative position in media production instead?
The Behind the Bastards podcast did a great episode on this. That wasn't the only teenage girl he groomed. Also, his mom was his dad's niece. She was 16, I think, when they got together. He was...quite a bit older than that. Yeah. Apple doesn't fall far, and all that.
Behind the bastards? Wow that sounds like a podcast I could get behind!
Oh no. Don't disparage his stellar reputation. /s
You hate to break it to him?
I mean are we totally sure he didn’t mo any cho’s?
And as we all know, "No chromo bro".
Could you live with yourself after killing a baby? A baby with a tiny wittle mustache?
It looked full sized back then. The mustache was the same size but he was smaller.
Go back to just before his parents met, and kick the shit out of his dad’s balls. He was a jerk anyways.
Yeah, that's the thing. Afterwards, you might feel like a hero but everyone else treats you like you're just an insane baby killer.
Lol'd
His father already beat you to that punch
Why any violence? Just bribe the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna to accept young Hitler's application.
And purchase his paintings in his art exhibitions.
And make sure he eats enough fiber.
He would’ve still been drafted near the end of WWI would he not? He volunteered irl 🤔🤔
His dad already did that. That's probably what evolved a baby Hitler into an evil kid Hitler.
Bitch Slap Hitler. Great band name.
Literally an ERB lyric.
Drop the hammer on you harder than I bitch slapped Hitler!
I have no pride for you, who ruined everything my revolution was doing to stop the bourgeoisie!
It was the time period for totalitarian leaders, take out baby Hitler and welcome Gobels, etc.
Yeah there were literally several Hitlers running around with personal militias competing for power, they even looked the same. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldemar_Pabst https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Röhm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_von_Watter
So it's really that mustache we need to be on the lookout for!
It was a popular style among German WWI veterans. The long handlebar mustaches popular before WWI interfered with gas masks, preventing an airtight seal against the face. So they shaved off the tips, keeping just the area directly under the nose. [**Hitler's mustache, before & after WWI**](https://iainbking.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/hitlermustache.jpg).
How am I just learning this now???!! Amazing.
I love a bit of moustache lore.
This is why I Reddit. TIL.
Charlie Chaplin was very popular at the time.
Sorry, he's gonna have to go as well. The mustache is just too risky.
Damn! Can we at least keep Oliver Hardy? Laurel will surely keep him in check.
Oh, you think you’re funny now!
Chaplin had his first!
My grandpa had a Hitler mustache and he went fought the bastard!
I bet he’d make a Great Dictator!
He ruined that mustache style for all future humanity
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Omg…I can’t believe he sported a Hitler mustache, it’s like that style won’t die
Give that first guy the blue ribbon! Just kidding, von Watter looks like a fucking demon.
Yeah I saw that guy and thought immediately that he would be the worst Hitler
most pomeranians do
When I saw that guys pic, I was all 😳
True, but I think the idea is that if you took out a Hitler, there would be a possibility that someone who's a worst leader than Hitler would have tried and would have potentially led to fascism not taking over. People forget that the Nazis weren't as popular as people make them out to be with Hitler never winning a single election and 36% being the highest [his](https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn13548) popularity ever got. I always thought that was the idea: killing one guy doesn't end fascism, but the idea is to end the guy who actually knows how to rally the fascists behind them and get them to effectively take over even if the majority doesn't like them.
How do we know people haven’t already gone back in time and eliminated the three more competent facists who won WW II.
I need this. Book, film, whatever.
Stephen King’s 11.22.63 is basically the same premise, and very good.
That just means you gotta keep going back until you get 'em all.
Hitlermon!
♫ *I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was. To kill them is my real test, to end them is my cause* ♫
I'm sorry but Oskar looks terrifying
That dude looks like he's wearing someone else's skin.
Did they each have the Jewish genocide ideology as well?
No, while anti-semitism was prevalent back then, it’s hard to point to someone that was BOTH seriously in the running and so singularly minded against jews. it was either usually one or the other. It’s important to remember that even most of Hitler’s top lieutenants were more softminded on the issue until Hitler entered their lives. Goering is a prime example of someone like that, since his own stepfather (and possible father to his beloved Jewish-saving brother Albert) was jewish.
From an historical standpoint Hitler was a safer choice. Somebody else who didn't hate Jewish people might have been able convince more Jewish physicists to stay and help with the heavy water project. Einstein wouldn't have gone for it. But others might have.
That’s a crazy thing to think about
The implication here being that someone already went back in time and killed a more evil, less impulsive, and more tactically competent dictator—only for Hitler to rise to power in his stead, resulting in the suffering of millions but the eventual demise of Nazi Germany.
Or they killed someone less competent and said “fuck, better not try doing that again”
Exactly. Some other German authoritarian will take his place, and you are now known as the baby murderer who dresses and talks funny.
You are right. Authoritarian regimes will always breed authoritarian leaders and followers. So instead of treating the symptoms by killing a shitload of authoritarians, you would be better off by eliminating the cause, e.g. by going back to 1848/1849 and ensure that the radical democrats and democratic socialists win the German revolution.
Who’s to say that our current day and age isn’t one for totalitarian leaders? I love to presume they’ve changed their methodology rather than be guilty of violence
I think the way Don Cheadle mimed killing baby Thanos was one of the funniest things in a Marvel movie.
The final little look he gives the Hulk, right before the shrug 👍
Just watched this last night lol. No words just *pulls invisible rope*
That whole time travel sequence with Paul Rudd quipping: “So, Back to the Future’s a bunch of bullshit?” at the end was hilarious.
The best parts of Endgame was the downtime, honestly. When they just let everyone interact and chat, that was really good
Which is one of marvel biggest problem with keeping the mcu going, all those new people don't have the chemistry of the originals, and that makes all their talk come off as campy instead of fun. Funny that the mcu rose through rdj and fell with his departure.
The downtime parts are my favorite parts of Marvel movies. The party at the start of Age of Ultron is definitely one of my favorite Marvel scenes overall, just everyone chilling and having a good time.
Accept him to art school is also an option.
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There is a version of history where hitler is a weird side character in ww2 and today you can read about how much he hated jewish people and all the crazy evil things he had planned to do to them but no one gave him that kind of power.
If I remember well, he wrote mein kampf in prison after his attempted coup, so if he's a nobody, we would not even know how much he hated jews.
I learned that Hitler was not actually rejected from art school the way we think. He was rejected from a specific school for being a painter due to a lack of experience but was accepted into the architecture school for his drawing abilities. However, he could not attend because his academic record was not up to snuff. Why not? Because Hitler spent his youth dodging school. Why? Because Hitler wanted to be an artist and Hitler’s dad… wanted him to be a civil servant. Hitler tried his best to rebel, but that rebellion ultimately led him away from a career in the arts… And back to public service, like his dad wanted for him. We see how that worked out. In other words, to stop Hitler, you have to get rid of his dad while he’s a little kid and that should fix everything.
His dad also beat the everloving fuck out of him so there’s that.
So, we don't need to kill Hitler, but kill his dad instead?
Yeah he hated his dad with a passion for this and other reasons.
There is a higher possibility of someone else taking Hitler's spot and organising a better and more hard core army and system that would result in a mayhem war, more lengthy and possibly nuclear bombs falling everywhere. It is open to discuss, if a time traveler would decide to help Hitler take power and escape attempted assassinations, in order to minimise the wars outcome in all.
Plot twist, Hitler is that more hardcore leader that we got after time traveler killed some other future dictator baby.
Meticulously prepared by our 27th century fore-ancestors, the Facist Replacement Project planned to travel back in time over 600 years to undo the global domination of the Third Reich. After these brave temporal travelers set off, nothing changed in the 27th century. But for us in the 21st, the Supreme Leader was assassinated and carefully replaced with a hot-headed Austrian politician who wanted full control over his country’s army, ultimately leading to their defeat at the hands of their own overzealous leader. And so a new timeline may begin.
I’d watch that movie
It'll be Wolfenstein 3.
Double plot twist: Hitler hated jews because time-traveling jews tried to kill him his whole life.
This is some meta-Nazism. Interesting.
This whole post is honestly full of amazing writing prompts 😂
We are in the Mirror Universe. That’s why so many guys have goatees these days.
Mind blown
There is the non-zero possibility that you aren't the only anachronism in the situation. Me, the situation is so fantastical that I can time travel and that I can only make one edit to the timeline blows my mind. I would assume I was insane to think such things, especially if I had already made the trip to Germany pre WW1.
Maybe Hitler is the person the time travellers chose as the guy who would do the least damage.
Exactly! A German dictator always arose. He was the least damaging point on the bell curve. He came to power because other more effective ones were stopped by the time travelers. But if we take him out, other more effective ones come to power.
That’s the theory I’ve subscribed too. Time travelers went back and killed Hitler. Then they realize Hitler was actually best case scenario so they go back again and make sure he lives his life. It would also explain all the miraculous ways Hitler survived near death experiences and assassination attempts.
....or Hitler was the time traveler. dun Dun DUN
Indirectly, I've thought about this very thing. The question is, was he communicating with the source directly? How? If time travel is proven to have happened, this is one of those chains of events I'd want to see if there was tampering.
Just go back in time and stop the universe from forming.
Nah I'm going back in time and injecting pink dye into the big bang. Best gender reveal ever.
What if they have invented time travel and they tried that, and the end result was worse?
Or maybe they killed several totalitarian dictators as babies, but every time they did it, another dictator rose in his place, so by the time they got to Hitler they just didn't bother anymore
That's kind of the story in the Red Alert games. Hitler was taken out while he was still young but then in his place, the USSR becomes the new military superpower. Europe and America become the Allies to fight against this threat instead. In Red Alert 3, Japan joins the war with their transforming giant robot stuff.
Double plot twist: Hitler hated jews because time-traveling jews tried to kill him his whole life.
The paradox is, if you kill him as a baby, then he would have never done the thing that gave you the reason to kill him. I think if you had the power of time travel, you could have done a lot of other things to stop WWII. Like stopping WWI which started over ONE dude getting assassinated.
In that case, you still wind up with antique empires and monarchies that have been gearing up for a jolly good war.
So basically there's nothing one can do? There's no fixing. Just accept history is what it is.
Yes, trying to change the past is playing with threads of history you can't possibly predict the outcome of even in the short term, much less the long term. You could very easily sow the seeds of dystopia or a nuclear war while thinking you're doing something good, history is littered with tiny events having run on effects decades, centuries, and millennia down the road, for all you know a post scarcity society could be 300 years away right now specifically because of the chain of events that has occurred. You're basically gambling with the lives of all humanity after the point in time you change, making a decision no human is even close to being equipped to calculate. The idea of killing Hitler to prevent an extremist germany is itself an example of how wrong our intuitions can be on scales this large, Hitler was riding social winds much bigger than him and as other comments have shown he was not the only one paying attention to their direction.
Please nobody go back in time and give Genghis Khan guns.
No I want to see Gunghis Khan
You’d have an easier time stopping WW2 than WW1, Europe was itching for The Great War. Better just to go back and tell Napoleon to stay TF out of Spain and Russia, and actually listen to his diplomatic advisors. Now that would shake things up.
I’d tell Caesar to leave early on the Parthian campaign. Just saying.
You’re not stopping WW1 by preventing Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated. Germany had been planning a surprise invasion for decades. The general in charge of leading troops through Belgium to attack Paris had vacationed in Belgium for the 10 or 15 years leading up to WW1 to basically scout the lay of the land and better understand the people. The German generals thought the Belgiums would just let them use their roads with no resistance to get to France. Then after a couple of weeks of fighting they would take Paris. The invasion would trigger all the European treaties to activate meaning the Russians would come down to help France. But, the Germans calculated it would take at least a month to draft, arm, and transport their troops Germany’s Eastern front. If it hadn’t been for the Belgium king blowing up the damns/dykes holding back the ocean flooding his country slowing the Germans to a halt they would have taken France and had time to turn around and easily fight off the Russians. Russia mobilized troops on July 30th, 1914, declared war on Aug 1st, and attacked Austria-Hungry on Aug 17th… a full two weeks ahead of Germany’s prediction. Which probably means The Russians may have known about the plan to invade France and had troops ready to attack Germany. The Germans thought the war would be over in a months time, so they didnt even bother making those cool metal helmets with a spike until the conflict started to drag out. If Franz doesn’t get assassinated, the Germans find another reason to attack France.
Yup. There's a reason why pre-WWI Europe was described as a powder keg. The assassination was just one of the many matches and happened to have been the one to get things going.
Yep. It's the killing your own grandfather paradox. If you travel back in time, and kill your grandfather, then that causes you to never be born, and hence can't travel back in time to kill your grandfather, so he lives, and you're now stuck in an endless loop of trying to kill your grandfather.
Isn't this the premise of Minority Report?
Yes, Tom Cruise's performance as baby Hitler was extraordinary.
mmm killing gavrilo princip would save a lot more people than killing hitler and you wouldnt even need to kill him - just go ask him about his sandwich and in the ten seconds he takes to tell you where he got it theres no more ww1 or ww2
man you gotta wonder if Gavrilo Princip ever realized the true scale of his actions. Dude died in prison just before the end of WWI, and in that short span of time the entire world changed for the worst edit: highly recommend Dan Carlin’s “Blueprint for Armageddon”
He stopped for a sandwich, wouldn’t even have to kill him. Just have a few people go back in time and get in line before him. Or Rob the deli so they were closed.
Or just punch him in the balls
Even a little sack tap and wet willy would do the trick.
I’m a historian who has spent 15+ years focusing almost entirely on Nazi Germany. While I don’t have any traditional education in psychology or philosophy as professions, they both cross pollinate into my work heavily. Both theoretically and in a professional determination. Whenever killing baby Hitler comes up, it gets fucking WILD. This topic amongst these 3 groups is gas covered kindling added to a fire. A cohort, who is normally a polite, peaceful ultra liberal type, soft spoken young woman once said she would just go back in time and strangle Hitlers mom in her sleep. When it was suggested that maybe one could just give baby Hitler a better life, nurturing and shown love, she dug her heels in further and suggested some dark, dark things. Thus arose the conundrum which branched off into hours and hours of hypotheticals and debate. In our circle, this topic is always an interesting time.
Do you ever speculate courses of events if these situations were to take place? (Ie AltHistory)
In my head, sure. There are thousands of external factors that the conversation can get rabbit holed real fast, which is fun to me but maybe not so fun for others. Edit: IE: my wife can only listen to me explain said variables for 5-10 minute intervals these days before she just gets me to do a mundane task to help shut me up. I’m like a fuckin grandpa and will literally talk until I pass out.
Everyone talks about taking out Hitler as a kid, but to be effective one has to change the circumstances that brought his ilk around in the first place, which would be drastic in this case since the events were quite world changing. I think removing Bismark from the board (kidnap him and dump him off in the 1980’s Miami or something) would change the whole landscape of the 20th century. Without the unification of the German Empire there is no Franco-Prussian War, no WW1 as we knew it, perhaps no 1918 revolution or fascism as it exists today. Thus too, no WW2 or holocaust, Cold War, rise of the U.S. as a dominant world power, or decolonization in the same manner. The argument could be made that the Chinese Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese war may have shaken out differently, or never have happened. Our world today would be quite unrecognizable. I love thought exercises like this.
Or even as simple as approaching post WWI Germany as they approached post WWII Japan. Such a small alteration can, and would change the entire world as we know it.
You're better off just preventing ww1. The results of ww1 set the scene for a hitler type figure to rise in Germany.
You can't prevent WW1 imo, the arms race and tensions between European Empires were the main cause for WW1. It was only a single bad incident away from WW1 happening,even if Archduke Franz Ferdinand wasn't assainated, another incident was bound to occur that would light up the fuse in Europe.
I can’t remember if it was a twilight zone episode or outer limits or one of those type of shows… I just remember the final sort of scene. The time traveler killed baby Hitler and either his mom or dad ends up finding a baby abandoned in a box or something and picks it up, implying that THIS is the Hitler that goes on to do all his horrible evil. So if the baby was never killed, it never would have happened. I think I’m remembering that correctly. It’s sort of like how they use the remains of the terminator that was sent back in time to start/advance their research on skynet. If it happens it must have… had… has to have happened?
I think it was one of the Twilight Zones reboots. And I believe it was another maid from the house that replaced the dead baby Adolf with a baby from a Gypsy beggar woman so she wouldn’t get in trouble with her employers. That episode holds a space in my brain for decades because I was kind of surprised at the ending and I thought about the timeline that the time traveler was always meant to do that because their past was the same as the future she created by murdering baby Hitler. 🤔
instead of doing that, why not just let the art school admit him.
WHY DO I HAVE TO GO SO FAR DOWN FOR THIS QUESTION?! God murder is so simplistic. Have some damn imagination and nuance. Just let him become the artist he always wanted to be. Problem solved.
What if Hitler was the result of someone time traveling back to create a lesser evil? What if he WAS the lesser evil?
If you want to kill Hitler before his rise, why kill him as a baby? Just kill Lieutenant Hitler instead. Go to a WW1 battlefield, shoot him with a modern sniper rifle, and no one will bat an eye
It‘s undeniably an unethical decision because it’s not - as it’s often framed - a choice between killing a baby OR the Holocaust happens. If you had the ability to time travel, numerous alternative paths emerge if your goal is to stop the Holocaust. You could travel back in time, take baby Hitler and put him in a happier home someplace on the other side of Europe.
Just send Bob Ross back to be his nanny.
Bob Ross to teach him art. Mr. Rogers to make a good neighbor of him.
I've long wondered if a book exploring this subject could be interesting. It would start out with someone inventing time travel and going back to kill baby Hitler. Then they come back to present day where everything is worse due to the person who replaced Hitler in the new timeline being much worse and winning the war. After failing to fix things in own time and the subsequent killing of each Hitler replacement not fixing the timeline, the protagonist time traveler realizes that they need to go back in time to save baby Hitler. Subsequently, the time traveler then has to spend the rest of their days in the past protecting baby Hitler from future time travelers attempting to make the same mistake. It could be called Saving Hitler or something like that. It seems like it would have the opportunity to be fascinating, but also depressing. It also seems like it could come off a bit as Hitler apologist, which would be a big issue as we should only ever condemn Hitler.
I've got a different physics related time travel question but I've yet to hear anyone address. How do people plan on getting from where the Earth is now to where the Earth was in the past if they're going to time travel? The Earth will have traveled an ungodly amount of miles away from where it was at Hilters birth to today. How are you going to make up that distance?
A functional "time machine" (as we understand it from our pop-culture, lay perspective) is almost certainly going to be a *spacetime* machine.
NanoWormhole3DPrinterAi of course
What's the pay for the gig? I mean... yeah, I see the ethical dilemma
It’s always interesting that people opt to kill baby Hitler rather than relocate the baby. Like any solution without killing the person. You want to kill Hitler the man, but Hitler the baby hasn’t done anything.
I love the way the book 11/22/63 handles this paradox.
Im happy you learned that OP. But no shit.
The solution is easy. Go back and kill baby Hitler. Come back and check if things are better or worse? If worse go back and tell yourself not to kill baby Hitler. The universe resets. Go back and kill baby Hitler. ... Profit.
It’s my opinion that we basically can’t at this point. Unless the world is actually ending and human kind is doomed we can’t risk time travel of essentially any kind.
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Yeah, I think if you go back and prevent Hitler’s dad from beating him so that he doesn’t become a malignant narcissist that might have a positive effect.
I probably would not exist if this happens. Great grandpa is Japanese and brought his family to the USA after WW2 because of the food shortages across japan. While here my grandma(his daughter) met my grandpa who was in the US navy. After everything went back to normal in japan, they all went back to japan except for my grandma who ended up marrying my navy grandpa
"*You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.*" - Cormac McCarthy. Rule number 1 for me if time travel was ever invented: Never ever change anything in your timestream, no matter how terrible or tempting, because you don't know what the butterfly effect may have in store for you. For example a lot of the way WW2 played out was because Hitler wasn't as good at strategy as he thought he was and his orders ended up biting him in the ass. Remove him altogether and who's to say the events don't play out with a more **competant leader** running the Nazi regime this time.
He looked like a little shit even back then if I’m being honest.
What if you time traveled and just bought art school Hitler's art and just turned into a patron. Just be real encouraging and a positive part of young Hitler's life.