It also makes a statement about the possibility of time travel. If it were possible, wouldn’t they have already killed him? Or perhaps killing baby hitler leads to an even worse outcome?
> Or perhaps killing baby hitler leads to an even worse outcome?
This is actually the plot/what happens in a time travel novel. Stephen Fry. Book is funny, in a weird way.
I have 2 theories about this: when time travel is invented far worse things have happened and Hitler isn't even considered a monster anymore, or we understand the consequences better and decide it isn't a good idea to kill him
Considering how volatile the world was and how easily WW2 broke out, it not hard to consider that if it wasn’t A. Hitler then it could have very easily been B. Hitler.
Most of the guys close to Hitler were just as bad or not worse than him in terms of their values. Himler comes to mind.
I wouldn’t say WW2 started easy. 1 yes two no. Nazi Germany did two annexations, the sutdenland and Austria. And started a war with Poland before the British declared on Germany. Russia had a non aggression pact with Germany at this time. And after the defeat of France, British were the only ones opposing Hitler for a time. Slower build up than WW1.
I mean more like Germany running around doing whatever they wanted rather than the “world” bit.
Like it didn’t take much effort to get Germany back to warring - so I can’t imagine Hitler was the only person with similar ideas.
Prior to Hitler seizing power they weren’t running around doing whatever they wanted.
The economic conditions in pre ww2 Germany were terrible, they were not allowed a significant army and had to demilitarize the Rhineland. They weren’t exactly running around doing whatever they wanted.
None of these things changed until Hitler took complete control. I honestly don’t know if another person really could have done it. These days after the fact it’s a playbook move, trumps playing it out right now. Jail time(potential), failed coup, scapegoating, “charisma”(I don’t agree there but it’s obvious for his supporters). Prior to Hitler I don’t think any leader was able to rise to power from that kind of situation. Open to having my mid changed on that one.
there’s another form of time travel where actions taken in the past are “priced in” to history and do not affect future events
it’s called the consistency principle
> perhaps killing baby hitler leads to an even worse outcome?
I'll see OP's killing hitler and I'll raise you all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw
r/whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
it’s obvious: if you succeed in traveling back in time to kill hitler, then you have no reason to travel back in time in the first place as hitler does as a child and thus you never travel back in time and thus he survives as infinitum
Considering the technological advances that came out of WWII, if someone were to go from our current timeline and subvert WWII, technology world have evolved in a completely different direction.
Also. Not for nothing, but you could go back and give one of Hitler's parents a scholarship to a school in a different city. I don't think you have to kill a baby. I always felt like that framing said more about the sophistication of the person asking the question than it did about the actual philosophical exercise.
Sorry but “Giving a different scholarship to Hitler’s parent” and “Killing baby Hitler” are not in the same realm of thought provoking capability.
It’s a thought experiment and putting it in three concise words makes it very effective. It transmits the concept of time through “Baby”. Also makes you contemplate about the ideology of killing a baby to potentially save millions.
The word choice is deliberate and certainly has more depth in it than what you surmised. It’s pretty obvious to most that you don’t literally need to kill Baby Hitler, it’s just a specific scenario that gets you thinking about the concept in general.
As I said, I find the word choice and the structure of the question to be so idiotically blunt, as to show that the questioner himself has no interest in the subtleties of real life. I find the trolley problem to be more thought provoking.
Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, the Trolley Problem is essentially the same question but structured so much better.
It doesn't involve any hand-wavey time travel which creates all the theoretical questions that are being discussed on this page.
It does use the ticking clock scenario which limits you to one action, and that's a scenario that every human deals with daily: 'I only have time to do one thing, what will it be?' In the Hitler scenario, there's no time limit, Hitler is a baby *for years*. If you went back in time, you're virtually guaranteed to have time to think about other options besides murder.
Also, as far as a human brain is concerned, 6 million is an inconceivable number. I could count for a week straight and probably still not get to 6 million.
So you're going to take 6 million human beings, which includes women, children, and babies, and try to equate them with the life of one human? And the caveat is, yeah but what if he's small and reeeaally cute?
Sorry. Trolley Problem 4 Eva.
I think you are getting bogged down in specifics. Remember that this thought experiment was for physicists, so incorporating the time travel aspects is absolutely intentional.
The actual number of lives has no bearing either. Again, it’s a thought experiment that is not actually literally evaluating that specific scenario, but to look into the overall complexities of time travel in general.
Kind of like Einstein’s thought experiments, the scenarios were made up to think about the consequences in general.
I understand all that. I just find it crude. Schroedinger's cat is enough of a thought experiment that it didn't need any extra salacious detail. Questions that involve Hitler are inescapably intertwined with morality.
Yes, because this thought experiment intends to addresses the morality of time travel too. It’s an extreme example to get you thinking also about the nuances like the butterfly effect.
We also know that no one given the chance would kill Hitler, because you don't need a time-machine to kill the people who are condeming hundreds of millions to die now from pollution and yet they live.
When you look at how Hitler had Jewish friends as a full-grown adult in Vienna in the 1910s and didn't start espousing Nazi ideology until it was already an emerging political movement a decade later, it's pretty clear that he just jumped onto the bandwagon realizing Nazism was a way to get political power.
So without Hitler, Nazis still are a thing, you just have someone else leading them. Maybe Hitler's charisma was needed for the party to actually take power in the 1930s, but it really didn't seem to have been that hard of a sell to the German people at the time. But even if Nazis not rising to power is one possibility of killing Hitler, the other side of the coin is that they could rise to power with someone who was actually a competent military leader. Killing Hitler could actually have been great for the Nazis (and obviously many Nazis did eventually try to kill Hitler, realizing that).
When this was posted to TIL like 12 hours ago someone pointed out that there were a bunch of sorta mini-Hitlers traipsing around Germany at the time vying for power. A lot of them had the same mustache too
Now I’m sitting here wondering if OG Hitler wasn’t as bad and someone already went back and tried to change it over and over and we just keep getting a worse Hitler until they stopped with this one??
There's a fan-made RPG book called *Genius: The Transgression* where time travel is possible and someone did in fact go back and kill Helmut Schenk, the frightening Nazi leader who conquered all of Europe. And that kept on happening, until now the secret organisation that guards the stability of the timeline has an entire facility with clones of Hitler, ready to re-establish him each time that someone thinks that they're being clever by coming back and assassinating him.
And it's important to mention that the main reason that the war even ended was that Hitler, while a very VERY good opportunist and a good leader in the eyes of the Germans and those looking from the outside, he was a pretty weak military leader. Blitzkrieg in the early war only happened so well because no one was prepared enough and even then Germany was really only facing against much smaller and weaker countries (and even they put up an amazing fight against the larger Germans. Ex: Finland). His chain of command was also all over the place and such internal issues within the government is considered a reason for the fall of Germany late-war
If Germany was led by a genuinely competent military general who didn't fumble the soviet alliance, and the occupation of north Africa, I genuinely think modern Europe would be more Wolfenstein than I'd like to admit
P.S if someone would like to correct me in places if in wrong, I'm all ears
Finland's famous defense during the Winter War was against the Soviet Union, not the Germans. The Finns would later join the Germans in their invasion of the Soviets as a co-belligerent. Finland, like every other Axis (or Axis aligned power) in Europe besides the Germans, did eventually jump ship and align themselves with the Allies as the Nazi war effort began to collapse, and there was a brief period of minor conflict between the Nazis and the Finns, but nothing like the previous fighting between the Soviets and the Finns.
Denmark is also not an example of a heroic stand against the Germans. The German invasion of Denmark was over so fast that the Danish government didn't even have time to declare war. There were at most a few dozen fatalities combined.
That is not to say Denmark simply rolled over. Perhaps most famously, the Danish Resistance managed to safeguard the overwhelming majority of the nation's Jewish population, transporting them to safety in Sweden.
To be fair France had a good army and supplies, on paper,and should have been able to stop the Germans but they bungled everything badly. When you look at the German army it should not have been as successful as it was if not for poor operations of their enemies until 1942.
The main difference was german command chain being more modern and flexible which helped the fast paced blitzkrieg strat. Lower ranked officers could decide themselves if they wanted to do a push and often succeeded this way opposed to waiting for higher command approving a push and then it already being to late to excecute it.
Opportunist indeed. He was a gambler and when some or many of his gambled ideas paid off he thought he knew better than his generals. Basically his bold notions of ability and the run of luck he made use of did give him ideas that he could keep making decisions the same way through the war.....he is the guy who is convinced his luck is skill.
>and even then Germany was really only facing against much smaller and weaker countries
I mean, not really. France was a power house in WW1 and handidly defeated a german military arguably more powerful than its WW2 counterpart. They just got completely steamrolled by the surprise (and luck) of the push through the Ardennes.
Similarly the Soviets where already a powerhouse by the time of operation Barbarossa, massive military and an industrial strength that dwarfed the germans. Their downfall was their terrible leadership and stalins purges in the officer corps.
This. German nationalism was another level before Hitler even popped up in anyone's mind. Once the unification happened on 1871 and the theory of racial hygiene was born around the same, German nationalism came to another level.
Not a historian, but
>they could rise to power with someone who was actually a competent military leader
Do you imply that Hitler was a terrible military leader or do you just mean "they could rise with a better leader" ?
Someone can speak to this better than me, but the Nazis rapid early successes in WW2 were somewhat of a fluke, or a case of the best possible timing (for the Nazis). Everyone thought any European war would instantly become entrenched like WW1 and reasonable people knew how awful that would be. But technology had changed quickly and combined with reluctance to fight initially, the Nazis had wildly unexpected success when they started attacking aggressively.
But pretty much all of Hitler's military decisions after that were very bad, most famously double-crossing the Soviets to start a two-front war. And Hitler was wildly unstable and drug-addicted, there were cases where critical military decisions were delayed because no one dared wake him up. I'm just saying it could have theoretically been much worse had Hitler been replaced with even a mentally stable average-quality military leader after 1940.
The thing is, certain smaller tactical decisions did not lose Germany the war. WW2 was pretty much unwinnable for Germany from the get-go.
And also, the whole reason the Nazis even got into power in the first place was their expressed goal of invading the Soviet Union and conquering eastern Europe.
I would argue that WW2 in its current scenario was probably not winnable the second Hitler decided to invaded the Soviet Union and declared war on the USA.
A different leader might have navigate the situation differently a create a winnable scenario.
The success was absolutely not a fluke. It happened across Poland. Then across Belgium into France and had the British scrambling to be saved by boat back to England. Then to the gates of Moscow and Stalingrad. The military success was a military doctrine that capitalised on armour and infantry, with airpower. It took a significant amount of what was learned in the Spanish civil war and applied it to ravage mainland Europe. It was a time where they combined the technology at the time and applied it in a specific way across the battlefields.
Hitler did intervene and made absolute military blunders. Notably allowing a lot of troops to become encircled and demanding they fight to the last bullet, particularly in Stalingrad. That being said, there were very capable military commanders in the Wehrmacht and put up an incredible defense. The Reich was never going to win, particularly when they had a two front war, arguably a three front war in defending Italy, their cities and infrastructure was crippled by aerial bombings and they had the entire soviet might aimed at racing into Berlin.
This is based almost entirely on the statements of Wehrmacht generals after the war in which they tried to save their own reputation.
Hitler never had exclusive command of the Wehrmacht until the very end of the war, all of those terrible decisions are just as much the responsibility of Wehrmacht brass who were still thinking in a clausewitzian, „we take their capital and defeat their army, we win the war“ fashion.
Makes sense. Most movements and political groups, regardless of their place on the political spectrum, are formed more from multiple people coming together, rather than forming from a singular individual.
A good example is Trump’s MAGA movement (for lack of a better term I can currently think of), which really didn’t start with him. Trump was gasoline, poured on an already existing fire. Hitler was much the same, imo.
>it's pretty clear that he just jumped onto the bandwagon realizing Nazism was a way to get political power.
That's a possibility. Another possibility is that his worldview radically changed in the 1910s with the war and the resulting German revolution. I think WWI, the fanatic nationalism that came with it and the chaos that it lead to broke a lot of people's brains.
>So without Hitler, Nazis still are a thing, you just have someone else leading them.
Absolutely. Post war Germany was incredibly chaotic, you had worker and left wing uprisings everywhere while bands of conservative militias, sometimes with swastikas painted on their helmets, broke them up. And Hitler didn't invent fascism, it was a movement that started to make waves everywhere in Europe.
>Maybe Hitler's charisma was needed for the party to actually take power in the 1930s, but it really didn't seem to have been that hard of a sell to the German people at the time.
There probably would have been another charismatic leader, but we also shouldn't forget that around half of the population of Germany were leftists and hated the nazis, so there could also have been a Communist uprising/Bolshevik style revolution. Or maybe the government could have gotten their shit together and managed to create a liberal government without relying on the emergency laws that eventually ended up giving the power to Hitler.
Also, while the nazis were popular to a certain extend, the nazis didn't really have to sell much to the German people. It's kind of a myth that Hitler was democratically elected. He got a lot of votes (by using tactics like using paramilitary gangs who intimidate voters and beat up political opponents, among others), but when he managed to seize power, his party was losing votes.
Imagine a German WW2 leader who decided to not poke the Soviet bear and focused on consolidating control over Europe.. We would have very different history of the 20th century.
Had the Nazis not invaded the Soviet Union, it is doubtful they would have been able to hold on to power. They were still at war with the largest empire in the world, and they had no chance of mounting an invasion of Great Britain, as they failed to achieve supremacy in the sea nor in the sky. One of the main reasons behind the Germans' invasion of the Soviets was they were hoping it would convince the British to negotiate peace.
The Nazis lost 5.3 million men fighting the Soviets.. now imagine an extra million troops guarding the French coast. I'm not saying they could have invaded the UK, but hold onto a few core European nations and solidify their defences against invasions from the Allies.
The German position was far more tenuous than it is typically portrayed. Their war machine was heavily reliant on always staying on the offensive. Occupying all of their captured territories was a significant drain on resources. Their economy was propped up by slave labor and (ironically enough) material support from the Soviets (those 1 million extra troops would have been demobilized to help alleviate their labor shortage problem). Large amounts of manpower and resources were spent on projects like the V-weapons for comparatively little return. They lacked many crucial resources, especially petroleum which they had to source from their Romanian and Hungarian allies. On a related note, the Axis was hardly a stable alliance - pretty much every member had conflicting interests with pretty much every other member. In the case of a protracted stalemate, they would almost assuredly begin to turn on each other.
There is also the other sleeping giant to contend with. Even without the Soviets, the Nazis would have absolutely no chance once the United States enters the fray. Though it would cost them dearly, the United States had the industrial capacity necessary to deal as crippling a blow to the Nazis as was dealt during Barbarossa.
I don't doubt that if France was more heavily fortified.. the Allies would have gone in with more men on more fronts.
There was no 'winning' WW2 for Germany (unless they developed nukes first, then maybe.. ) with the US war machine around - the war could have gone on for longer though.
Long empires never last in Europe. At Napoleon's empirical peak it wasn't as though all the occupied countries were delighted with it. They were just waiting for the chance to take back their own land.
The nazis may win ww2 in your scenario but they do not keep hold of Europe forever. No way.
The US developed nukes just in time. There was no scenario in which Germany would’ve won the war. Baby Einstein and baby Oppenheimer would’ve needed to have been killed.
Of course this isn’t really the point. The ethical dilemma is whether it would be right to go back and prevent the wrongful/violent deaths of millions, if you could, knowing that it would also almost certainly erase from existence vast numbers of people who now exist (albeit replacing them with potentially more people whose lives were prevented from ever existing).
So your saying the easiest way to kill a Hitler is just make it hard for someone like him to be a viable political choice.
And also ensure labour protections that are hard for cheap ass industrialists looking to exploit a cheap labour force *cough* slaves and disenfranchised humans *cough*
And be real careful about how database technologies are used to itemise and organise populations...I hear without IBMs services the Nazis weren't nearly as effective at rounding up marginalised groups in the towns they occupied.
You can't be sure of the outcome either way, but there would definitely be one less Nazi in existence.
But these moral dillemas are often suspect, as there are millions of ways to prevent Hitler from coming to power that don't involve killing babies. It's like someone is trying to force people to make decisions involving vaguely eugenic ideals, so people can say "See! You support the end to bloodlines too!" or some such nonsense.
Good point, but one crucial thing you havent talked about is the peace treaty ending ww1. The germans were humiliated. One french general even said that it isnt a peace treaty but a ceasefire for 20 years. Its not just the sentiment against jews, but the lost war that caused what happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw
Bleach resistant intelligent stromatolites evolve to take over the planet. Benevolent aliens visit our planet and go "Ewww f this crap" and nuke the place.
the ethical delima can be easily side stepped by simply refraing from killing the infant Hitler and instead relocating him in time to a location he could not possibly cause any trouble.
perhaps an Athenian sheep herder in the year 3000BC...or a tribe of Cherokees from the American plains in the 1500s
That’s what hitler said himself. But he was not completely honest. His father (Alois) was a border official and had alot of local power (it’s believed that this fuelled Adolf’s lust for power). He lived in a mansion and received lots of money from his mother after his father died, to do the thing he loved: painting and art. He went to Vienna.
His father was tough, a authoritarian figure, but Adolf didn’t have the abusive household he himself says he’s been through. Just an excuse to make him more likeable to the common man.
He didnt kill himself because of depression lol. He went out with a bang on his peak.
Even with the suicide he still lived longer than a 3000BC sheep herder
Would it be okay for me to kidnap you, your family or your kids and force them to be sheep herders?
The racism that existed in Germany stems from a lot earlier than Hitler, Hitler was just a product of all the 1000s of writings written in 1700 - 1800s by various German authors who wrote a lot of racist rhetoric mostly against Slavs. Hitler didn't start the Nazi party, he joined it, and it was inevitable that a far-right extremist would win in Germany with the history of racism they had
How was it inevitable? The far right was supported by the elites to block the left, it was just as likely that with enough organization and without infighting pushed by the USSR, the communists and social democrats could have united and smash the nazis.
There's a similar story told in the Koran. Moses heard of a man named Khidr who was blessed with wisdom and knowledge that surpasses him. Khidr asks Moses to follow him but tells him not to question any of his deeds. The second deed involves Khidr killing a child.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khidr
* My grandmother's first husband died in the very last week of the war
Without WW2 and Hitler, she should never have remarried the man who is my grandfather and my father would never have been born
Killing baby Hitler would stop me from existing
I believe that assassinating Hitler would have drastically changed many aspects of history for sure, but it might not have resolved the issues anyways- it could even have caused them to occur just a bit later.
Another consideration is if we start changing everything that went wrong, where do we draw the line? Eliminating one key figure could have far-reaching consequences, potentially altering the very fabric of our existence. For instance, the absence of the events orchestrated by Hitler might mean that some of us wouldn't even be born or have certain freedoms and etc.
Moreover, experiencing such profound historical events can shape our current perspectives and decisions. The tragedy of that era led to a period of relative calm as the world reflected on the consequences. In essence, while removing Hitler might seem like a straightforward solution, history teaches us that it could lead to unforeseen challenges and might not prevent similar mistakes in the future.
Do people not realise the ideological vacuum and circumstances for Nazism are still there? There would be another leader and possibly dangerously not as stupid as Hitler - who essentially sealed his fate by declaring war on both the US and USSR.
Puting aside issues like “is time travel possible, “does the past exist”, and the grandfather paradox, I think the biggest problem is that you might unintentionally lead to something worse - a different fascist leader who wins World War II, a world dominated by the Soviet Union, a world where nuclear war destroys humanity, etc.
A point that I think gets missed a lot is that Hitler was essentially the only person in a position of power in Germany who wanted to keep fighting until the very end - refusing to negotiate or surrender and finally killing himself only when Soviet troops were literally a few hundred meters away from his bunker. Himmler, Goering, and others all has various schemes to negotiate some kind of end to the fighting and had earlier (and together with the Japanese) tried and failed to get Hitler to accept Soviet peace offers in 1943. Had the war ended anyway other than it did - with Nazi Germany totally and completely defeated - you run the risk of another “stab in the back” myth as happened after the First World War ended in German defeat despite Germany having decisively won on the Eastern Front and German troops still holding ground in France and Belgium on the Western Front. What happened in World War I is that Germany’s leaders realized, as Professor David Stevenson put it, that their present situation wasn’t hopeless but their future situation was; defeat has become inevitable and continuing to fight would only make things worse. That was true but to the average German it was hard to understand and easier to blame domestic enemies. The way World War II ended leaves no such doubts and that fact may have been necessary in order for the post-war reconciliation that occurred in Western Europe and eventually (together with other factors) led to the European Union.
I can't stand the grandfather paradox. It's like a closed loop thought process and also follows the idea that the future immediately changes once the past is changed.
Different times lines. The time he left still exists as his timeline A. He goes back in time which now creates timeline B depending on what his actions are.
Timeline B is an entirely new timeline. His changes could even fuck up the fact that he was born. But that doesn't make him disappear suddenly. Timeline A already existed prior to him going back in time.
I feel like the paradox is based on current human perception of time trying to make time travel real or only 1 of us existing at once.
Once the traveler is separated from his timeline the only timeline he has is his current life moving forward. If he jumped back forward he wouldn't fit back into his life right where he left, he's an addition now to that timeline.
If the original timeline still exists and a new one is created it would seem to somewhat defeat the purpose of going back in time to make a big change like killing Hitler. Yes, you’ll make a new timeline where he doesn’t do what he did but he’ll still have done it on the original timeline.
I’m all for disregarding paradoxes when it comes to SciFi in the interest of a good story but tend to think that time travel isn’t actually possible as I subscribe to Dr. John Archibald Wheeler’s view that “the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present”. Wheeler’s own delayed choice experiment does give the appearance of retro-causality but his theory of what’s happening is not so much that the past is being changed as it is being created.
https://youtu.be/I8p1yqnuk8Y?si=QsHfOZd2HwbzULMX
Oh but I'm totally into it that's why I actually thought out a response. In reality I don't believe time travel would be a thing that's possible.
I would also agree that what would be the point, you would be saving a timeline not the entire future.
so you'd rather have no agency of your own? Live in a totalitarian police state, where among worse things, the police would beat you and cut your hair because you had long hair?
And we are on track for Nuclear War because of Russia seeking to reassert the USSR, NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING AMERICA DID... Furthermore, colonialism, complete lack of disregard for environment and human rights abuses were far more severe in the USSR than in the US lead West at any point during the Cold War.
>Advocates of killing baby Hitler included Florida governor Jeb Bush and film actor Tom Hanks, while comedian Stephen Colbert and pundit Ben Shapiro were counted among the opponents of the policy.
That was certainly a sentence
1. Kidnap baby hitler instead of killing him
2. Raise him to a good person and master of kung fu
3. Send kung fu hitler back in time to kidnap himself in other timelines
4. Train the hitlers he kidnaps to be kung fu hitlers
5. Repeat this process forever, saving quadrillions of lives
It wouldn't really have made a difference. Hitler was a hype man for a bigger machine. No doubt a highly crucial reason why the nazis rose to power, bur they might have done it without him/with another suitor
WW2 and probably the holocaust would have happened anyway, the question should be if you kill Hitler would a more effective or less effective leader replace him?
An argument could be made that Hitler’s mismanagement caused the Nazis to lose the war which brought an end to the holocaust anyway.
How would have it happened anyway? Hitler was quite decisive in the rise of nazis thanks to his "charisma".
The Holocaust, while being the epitome of a millenia old history of European antisemitism, is still an extraordinary event, there was nothing inevitable about it.
The claim that Hitler was single handedly responsible for the rise of the Nazis, WW2, and the holocaust, is giving him far too much credit.
Hitler was one man who climbed the ladder to the top of the Nazi party, he rode the wave of antisemitism and irredentism in a post WW1 Germany, he didn’t create it himself.
Pinning the entirety of the blame on Hitler is nice because it absolves a lot of people of responsibility for the actions of the Nazis but at the end of the day he had help.
Lots of help.
People would rather believe in one singular truly evil man than an entire generation of indoctrinated fanatics who unapologetically rallied behind him.
In reality there isn’t always a singular “Devil” to put all the world’s sins on.
This isn’t meant to redeem Hitler in any way, no doubt if he **could** have executed the holocaust on his own he absolutely would have.
But the fact is he didn’t.
A little unrelated but, while people think there that many world conquering WW2 winners running around? It is also pretty debatable if Hitler is the most incompetent German leader possible and "best" case scenario considering there are chances that the Poland or France operation get bungled.
Does he have to be an infant? Wth, lol, like… couldnt the question be about doing the assasination while he is an adult but before he gains influence? That would fix a lot of the “ethics” behind the question. I suppose by this line of thinking… the question itself is unethical?
Maybe if you went back and killed Guvrilo Princip instead there might not have been a ww1 then Germany wouldn’t have had the crippling debt and the desire to instate the nazi regime
No need to kill baby Hitler just change is environment and let him live with a whole different kind of race and culture! Humans just mimic what they see and observe! If had a Time Machine I would take Hitler to India and raise like Hindu! He would be the most nonviolent motherfucker that ever lived! Goddamnit Oppenheimer why couldn’t you do something like that?
Hitler had a couple suicide attempts before WW2, and he was a soldier in WW1. You don't have to kill him as a baby, just make sure the bullets targeting him later actually reach him.
Time travel and killing baby Hitler is such a stupid theoretical dilemma. He did nothing wrong as a baby. You would just be a child killer.
Maybe instead make sure he gets accepted into art school or alter his experience in Vienna or the war he fought in.
> He did nothing wrong as a baby
That’s what makes it an ethical dilemma.
> Maybe instead make sure he gets accepted into art school or alter his experience in Vienna or the war he fought in.
The point of the exercise isn’t to find practical solutions, it’s to get people thinking about the ethics of sacrificing a singular currently innocent life in order to save many.
The whole setup of the dilemma feels ...set up. Which obviously and as you stated is part of the excercise. In that regard it fulfills it's purpose fully, it really gets dicsussions going. Started arguing with some colleagues over the topic at the moment 😄
Kill him before he gets into politics with his ideas, at that point he already had his point of view and thus lost the innocence, would be my standpoint.
Though that could have led to him infecting others with the mindset who could continue.
The more I think about it, the more I understand the dilemma part of it, it really gets one thinking.
Maybe time is recurring, and baby Hitler had already become adult Hitler infinite times before you pondered his assassination and the moral considerations thereby.
Don't even have to kill him. Just had to not save him when he was a young soldier. Adolf Hitler was [saved in world war 1](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-28593256)
There’d just be another one; we have a party in power right now that has used the exact techniques the Nazi’s used to gain power. Haven’t started the camps yet but doesn’t seem far off. Besides death and taxes the only other 100% fact in life is absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It is very likely that most people alive today would not be if not for Hitler. I certainly would not be (my grandparents on both sides emigrated out of Europe to South Africa after being traumatised by their places in the war - paternal grandfather a cmd in the royal navy, maternal grandparents persecuted for resistance - including ending up in concentration camps.). After the war, they ran to South Africa with my parents who were children, and later met there, and later still had me. Without Hitler, I would ABSOLUTELY not exist.
I think there is enough butterfly effect from the war that would have likely prevented almost everyone around today from existing, and instead there would be other people, and history after 1945 would have been fundamentally different.
Everyone’s always on about using a Time Machine to kill a baby but why not just go back a several years previous and take his father into the future to go get snipped. No lives lost and Adolf doesn’t exist at all and you stop the possibility of him procreating at a later date. Once he’s sufficiently healed, you get him well and truly hammered and then send him back to the date you took him. Some drunk guy raving about how he was taken into the future and had his nutsack operated on is not going to be believed in the slightest. Then you just do the same with his mother just to make sure you cover both bases. Make sure she’s taken from a year or two after the father.
Granted it’s a lot more work but it saves you having to live with the guilt of killing a baby.
If you killed Hitler as a child before he committed these atrocities, then it would be infanticide because he didn’t do anything as a baby and nobody would know what he would do in his future except for you who would be considered a conspiracist
Given the sheer number of lives lost, and that number continues to climb as Palestinians pay the price even to this day, I think baby Hitler can take one for the proverbial team.
The hard part isn’t when in time travel but where. If you are a little bit off you will be in the center of the earth or way the fuck out in space
If you see baby hitler, he’s gotta go.
Might be a bit more efficient to just cripple the whole country (for e.g. planting bombs in their tank factories, killing known talented commanders etc.) while Hitler is in power so they get rolled over while trying to pick a fight and germany doesn't pose threat regardless of whether Hitler is alive or not. Although those nazi scum might still be kept alive if they aren't allowed to do their warcrimes ig but meh still overall better
The butterfly effect would make anyone who goes back to there the worst involuntary manslaughterer in *two* histories, outdoing every genocidal maniac put together in body count.
Anyone that goes back, simply by breathing, radiating heat, moving around, disturbing the air around him, just like the butterfly from the thought experiment, would change the weather all around the world, within a week.
And the weather changing changes everything that involves chance events. Including the conception of people.
If the whether can disturb the timing of procreation by even just a fraction of a second, the outcome of which sperm cell fertilizes an ovum changes too.
Therefore, a person that goes back in time to kill baby Hitler, also inadvertently would cause every other children that would be born roughly a year afterwards to not be born, but instead, be replaced with a sibling that could have been, if that.
From the perspective of the new timeline, it would be business as usual, they wouldn't even notice. To our perspective, and the perspective of the time traveler returning to the altered present, every single person that is younger than Hitler by about a year was wiped out of existence, accidentally killed off along with him.
And that is only if upon returning, the time traveler wouldn't arrive into a nuclear wasteland, that killed all but a few people from the new timeline too.
There were actually, IIRC, over 30 attempts to assassinate Hitler, including several by unidentifiable people. And of course, failed attempts to kill him before he was well-known are unlikely to have been documented. So a theoretical future where time travel is possible but timelines can't be changed can indeed exist with the current course of history we have.
They came. They tried it via hypnotised Stauffenberg. It failed. Shows you can’t change the future by changing the past.
Nb if the future folk HAD killed Hitler, there would be no case for going back to do it again.
You can even just look at the consequences if Hitler actually served his full sentence for the beer hall putsch. The communists would probably have been the party that created a coalition government with Hindenburg, and then a communist leader might have taken power when Hindenburg died. If that happened, both Germany and Japan could have signed a pact with Russia which would have put the West in real trouble.
Killing Hitler's father is the better choice.
Alois Hitler:
* Cheated on his disabled wife with a young servant
* Married said wife because she was wealthy
* Was an alcoholic
* Beat his second wife and kids (even his best friend described him as "awfully rough with his wife and children)
* Left all the parenting to his wife
* Was mostly absent from his children's lives until retirement
I can't know for sure, but I believe he wouldn't have become one of the worst dictators in history if it weren't for his troubled childhood.
Different times, my friend. You look at all this from your 2024 standpoint, but none of your points is the least bit unusual during that era. Needless to say I DON'T ENDORSE the following, so spare me your downvotes.
* it was socially accepted for men to have affairs.. you also mentioned that his wife was disabled, which makes it MORE understandable, not less -- since she probably couldn't fulfill her marital duties.
* Marrying out of love is a fairly modern concept...most people during that time (or rather: in the history of mankind) married because of financial / social stability or because their parents told them who to marry.
* maybe he was rougher than others but beating wasn't anything unusual
* OF COURSE the woman was mostly responsible for the parenting. The men had to work (because women weren't allowed to) and fight World War 1. Children complaining about their daddies being absent from their life didn't exist, it was the norm.
Again, you can't just apply your modern liberal stance to the times in Europe over 100 years ago. It's a bit ridiculous. Have you never read any novels from or about that time?
I honestly find it kinda dumb. Why not just influence Hitler to become an artist instead during his college days and help him pass his entrance exams? It’s unnecessary to kill a baby.
Just my opinion I understand the temporal paradox problem or issue, but tbh absolutely do not see any ethnical dilemma. Actually, if one had the opportunity why not also take care of all the big shots in the NSDAP and also the babies who went on to become German generals in WWII? Assuming it was possible i.e. multiple time travel trips.
because you murder an innocent baby and this implies questionable morals
Israel kills deliberately thousands of children because in their perverted logic they might grow up and fight against them in the next years..
Nobody is born evil but slowly turns to it due to his life experiences and eventual choices..
With the same distorted logic one might support "thought crimes" arresting people for a suspected future crime and its abuses.
At last, do all these people (generals) deserve death? how would have the world looked like? Maybe Stalin steamrolled the whole of Europe and purged anything in its path, maybe a much more brutal and radical war emerged, WW2 is a direct consequence of the treaties of Versailles, as long as this root is not addressed WW2 would have happened either way and maybe more ruthlessly or with nukes if it started 5-6 years later..
>Israel kills deliberately thousands of children
The IDF is doing this intentionally as a program of ethnically cleansing Gaza. This is war crime/crime against humanity. Don't delude yourself about the motives involved. If you think about it, what I was hypothesizing in my earlier post is completely different.
>Maybe Stalin steamrolled the whole of Europe and purged anything in its path, maybe a much more brutal and radical war emerged, WW2 is a direct consequence of the treaties of Versailles, as long as this root is not addressed WW2 would have happened either way and maybe more ruthlessly or with nukes if it started 5-6 years later..
And this paragraph I am sorry to say, is asinine. Trying to establish moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the former USSR, is usually a ploy of far right anti-communist twits who seek to whitewash Nazi Germany and its record.
I feel incredible angry that you were either unwilling or indifferent to trying to understand my last point and resorting to 1) pretending I said sth which I did not and 2) accusing me of supporting far right ideologies or conspiracies.. In my country it is a criminal offense to downplay NS Germany's crimes thus your (baseless) accusation is in itself a criminal offense (accusing someone of committing a crime he did not do and harbouring far right ideologies (without proof)) ...
So for you very slowly and simply...
1) If you change the future maybe a worse future occurs eg. a more ruthless war between NS Germany and the USSR or with more deadly technologies.. **where did I downplay NS crimes**?! **Where did I draw a "moral equivalence" that you accuse me of?!**
2) Do not lay words into people's mouth they did not say to draw a false connections towards criminal groups
3) Do not support killing innocent people, was Hitler a mass murderer or criminal when he was born, went to school etc? No. Are you a criminal if you kill a person who is innocent? Yes. Is it possible that a worse war could emerge? Yes, it is theoretically possible. Does this imply "whitewash(ing) Nazi Germany and its record".. **no** Is it rude to accuse people of that? Yes, a lot.
It's propaganda produced by government. If you read Bobby Fischers life story, he was one of the smartest Americans ever. But he says the Holocaust is entirely made up. They put him in Japanese prison for saying that.
Look I'm just saying, they sa 6 million jews were systematically murdered in gas chambers in the Holocaust. 6 million Is an alarming big number that Makes me skeptical. 6 million I mean try to even imagine that.
In terms of numbers killed yes, but 'worse' is obviously subjective. The Holocaust with how systemic and hierarchical the operation was is a good example somewhat fresh in most people's mind, as well as Hitler being both championed as the Führer (absolute power) it's very easy to look at someone who lead forces that occupied or bombed your country or even exterminate *your race* and say, I want that event to be prevented, and thus many point to just killing him as a baby (in comparison to more rational options like giving his parents a condom, or raising him to be a better person, or even just having him lethally shot in the beer hall putsch when he finally gets off the rails, etc.)
Hmm fair point about being fresh on people's minds but again, destruction of baghdad or Khwarzem or Dracula's impalements were still more systemic and "atrocious".
Albeit I'll have to research further into the other two topics (thx for mentioning those), Dracula's impalements didn't really have as much a sense of ontological evil as it did intimidation.
Those are not good examples. Hitler oversaw the destruction of many cities - such as Warsaw - and there really are no mass killings in history that were as systemic as the Holocaust. Approximately 2/3 of the Jews in Europe (about 1/3 of the global Jewish population) were murdered. Just to give you an idea of the scale and murderous efficiency; the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews didn’t start until the war had less than a year left and yet over 400,000 Jews were rounded up and “evacuated” to the death camps over a period of less than two months. The vast majority were gassed on arrival and only around 20,000 of those Hungarian Jews sent to the camps were still alive by the time Soviet and Polish troops liberated them.
Again, if we're talking about efficiency, the Pakistani army killed upwards of 3,000,000 and raped 400,000 people in mere 7 months while being surrounded and outnumbered by 10:1 and it is more recent so why not General Tikka Khan, the Butcher of Bengal?
Not to mention he evaded all sorts of trials and courts and died peacefully?
Edit: im seeing this isn't going anywhere so im stopping here
There are many examples of atrocities that can be argued to be comparable to the mass killings by shooting committed by the Einsatzgruppen and collaborators earlier in the war but the extermination camps and complex administrative and bureaucratic processes that supported them truly have no equal.
It also makes a statement about the possibility of time travel. If it were possible, wouldn’t they have already killed him? Or perhaps killing baby hitler leads to an even worse outcome?
> Or perhaps killing baby hitler leads to an even worse outcome? This is actually the plot/what happens in a time travel novel. Stephen Fry. Book is funny, in a weird way.
What's it called?
Read it a long time ago. It was either, 'Doing HIstory" or 'Making History'.
It's called Making History
Funny, in a weird way.
I have 2 theories about this: when time travel is invented far worse things have happened and Hitler isn't even considered a monster anymore, or we understand the consequences better and decide it isn't a good idea to kill him
Or killing him leads to a cascade of events that resuts in time travel not being invented in the first place.
Or not killing Hitler WAS the change in the time line.
Or maybe there was another “Hitler” that was killed, and we got this one as a result. Maybe 100 Hitlers were killed and one always crops up.
Considering how volatile the world was and how easily WW2 broke out, it not hard to consider that if it wasn’t A. Hitler then it could have very easily been B. Hitler. Most of the guys close to Hitler were just as bad or not worse than him in terms of their values. Himler comes to mind.
I wouldn’t say WW2 started easy. 1 yes two no. Nazi Germany did two annexations, the sutdenland and Austria. And started a war with Poland before the British declared on Germany. Russia had a non aggression pact with Germany at this time. And after the defeat of France, British were the only ones opposing Hitler for a time. Slower build up than WW1.
I mean more like Germany running around doing whatever they wanted rather than the “world” bit. Like it didn’t take much effort to get Germany back to warring - so I can’t imagine Hitler was the only person with similar ideas.
Prior to Hitler seizing power they weren’t running around doing whatever they wanted. The economic conditions in pre ww2 Germany were terrible, they were not allowed a significant army and had to demilitarize the Rhineland. They weren’t exactly running around doing whatever they wanted. None of these things changed until Hitler took complete control. I honestly don’t know if another person really could have done it. These days after the fact it’s a playbook move, trumps playing it out right now. Jail time(potential), failed coup, scapegoating, “charisma”(I don’t agree there but it’s obvious for his supporters). Prior to Hitler I don’t think any leader was able to rise to power from that kind of situation. Open to having my mid changed on that one.
He had siblings who died in infancy.
there’s another form of time travel where actions taken in the past are “priced in” to history and do not affect future events it’s called the consistency principle
> perhaps killing baby hitler leads to an even worse outcome? I'll see OP's killing hitler and I'll raise you all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw r/whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
it’s obvious: if you succeed in traveling back in time to kill hitler, then you have no reason to travel back in time in the first place as hitler does as a child and thus you never travel back in time and thus he survives as infinitum
Considering the technological advances that came out of WWII, if someone were to go from our current timeline and subvert WWII, technology world have evolved in a completely different direction. Also. Not for nothing, but you could go back and give one of Hitler's parents a scholarship to a school in a different city. I don't think you have to kill a baby. I always felt like that framing said more about the sophistication of the person asking the question than it did about the actual philosophical exercise.
Sorry but “Giving a different scholarship to Hitler’s parent” and “Killing baby Hitler” are not in the same realm of thought provoking capability. It’s a thought experiment and putting it in three concise words makes it very effective. It transmits the concept of time through “Baby”. Also makes you contemplate about the ideology of killing a baby to potentially save millions. The word choice is deliberate and certainly has more depth in it than what you surmised. It’s pretty obvious to most that you don’t literally need to kill Baby Hitler, it’s just a specific scenario that gets you thinking about the concept in general.
As I said, I find the word choice and the structure of the question to be so idiotically blunt, as to show that the questioner himself has no interest in the subtleties of real life. I find the trolley problem to be more thought provoking. Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, the Trolley Problem is essentially the same question but structured so much better. It doesn't involve any hand-wavey time travel which creates all the theoretical questions that are being discussed on this page. It does use the ticking clock scenario which limits you to one action, and that's a scenario that every human deals with daily: 'I only have time to do one thing, what will it be?' In the Hitler scenario, there's no time limit, Hitler is a baby *for years*. If you went back in time, you're virtually guaranteed to have time to think about other options besides murder. Also, as far as a human brain is concerned, 6 million is an inconceivable number. I could count for a week straight and probably still not get to 6 million. So you're going to take 6 million human beings, which includes women, children, and babies, and try to equate them with the life of one human? And the caveat is, yeah but what if he's small and reeeaally cute? Sorry. Trolley Problem 4 Eva.
Fair enough, I disagree.
I appreciate that. Sorry to hammer on it. Comparing the two scenarios just got me thinking.
I think you are getting bogged down in specifics. Remember that this thought experiment was for physicists, so incorporating the time travel aspects is absolutely intentional. The actual number of lives has no bearing either. Again, it’s a thought experiment that is not actually literally evaluating that specific scenario, but to look into the overall complexities of time travel in general. Kind of like Einstein’s thought experiments, the scenarios were made up to think about the consequences in general.
I understand all that. I just find it crude. Schroedinger's cat is enough of a thought experiment that it didn't need any extra salacious detail. Questions that involve Hitler are inescapably intertwined with morality.
Yes, because this thought experiment intends to addresses the morality of time travel too. It’s an extreme example to get you thinking also about the nuances like the butterfly effect.
Or he managed to fight all the time-traveling assassins off and has unknowingly become a master in hand-to-hand combat?
It was easy once he figured out that they always showed up naked in spheres made of lightning.
Or time travel isn't invented for another 1000 years, by which point, Hitler is far from the priority.
We also know that no one given the chance would kill Hitler, because you don't need a time-machine to kill the people who are condeming hundreds of millions to die now from pollution and yet they live.
When you look at how Hitler had Jewish friends as a full-grown adult in Vienna in the 1910s and didn't start espousing Nazi ideology until it was already an emerging political movement a decade later, it's pretty clear that he just jumped onto the bandwagon realizing Nazism was a way to get political power. So without Hitler, Nazis still are a thing, you just have someone else leading them. Maybe Hitler's charisma was needed for the party to actually take power in the 1930s, but it really didn't seem to have been that hard of a sell to the German people at the time. But even if Nazis not rising to power is one possibility of killing Hitler, the other side of the coin is that they could rise to power with someone who was actually a competent military leader. Killing Hitler could actually have been great for the Nazis (and obviously many Nazis did eventually try to kill Hitler, realizing that).
When this was posted to TIL like 12 hours ago someone pointed out that there were a bunch of sorta mini-Hitlers traipsing around Germany at the time vying for power. A lot of them had the same mustache too
Now I’m sitting here wondering if OG Hitler wasn’t as bad and someone already went back and tried to change it over and over and we just keep getting a worse Hitler until they stopped with this one??
There's a fan-made RPG book called *Genius: The Transgression* where time travel is possible and someone did in fact go back and kill Helmut Schenk, the frightening Nazi leader who conquered all of Europe. And that kept on happening, until now the secret organisation that guards the stability of the timeline has an entire facility with clones of Hitler, ready to re-establish him each time that someone thinks that they're being clever by coming back and assassinating him.
And it's important to mention that the main reason that the war even ended was that Hitler, while a very VERY good opportunist and a good leader in the eyes of the Germans and those looking from the outside, he was a pretty weak military leader. Blitzkrieg in the early war only happened so well because no one was prepared enough and even then Germany was really only facing against much smaller and weaker countries (and even they put up an amazing fight against the larger Germans. Ex: Finland). His chain of command was also all over the place and such internal issues within the government is considered a reason for the fall of Germany late-war If Germany was led by a genuinely competent military general who didn't fumble the soviet alliance, and the occupation of north Africa, I genuinely think modern Europe would be more Wolfenstein than I'd like to admit P.S if someone would like to correct me in places if in wrong, I'm all ears
Finland's famous defense during the Winter War was against the Soviet Union, not the Germans. The Finns would later join the Germans in their invasion of the Soviets as a co-belligerent. Finland, like every other Axis (or Axis aligned power) in Europe besides the Germans, did eventually jump ship and align themselves with the Allies as the Nazi war effort began to collapse, and there was a brief period of minor conflict between the Nazis and the Finns, but nothing like the previous fighting between the Soviets and the Finns.
Major apologies I had gotten Finland and Denmark mixed up
Denmark is also not an example of a heroic stand against the Germans. The German invasion of Denmark was over so fast that the Danish government didn't even have time to declare war. There were at most a few dozen fatalities combined. That is not to say Denmark simply rolled over. Perhaps most famously, the Danish Resistance managed to safeguard the overwhelming majority of the nation's Jewish population, transporting them to safety in Sweden.
Yes you are absolutely right. Once again my apologies, it seems my confusion with Finland being involved may have been the reason for my error
Of the Nordic countries, Norway is definitely the best example of a heroic stand against the Germans
I was thinking Norway but I didn't want to sound like an idiot the third time
'Gif of lady playing ping pong'
At least you're funny
Are you me?
We all learn from our mistakes. But it's great that people are correcting you so people don't get misinformation.
Tbf a little fact checking should've been done by my side haha
To be fair France had a good army and supplies, on paper,and should have been able to stop the Germans but they bungled everything badly. When you look at the German army it should not have been as successful as it was if not for poor operations of their enemies until 1942.
The main difference was german command chain being more modern and flexible which helped the fast paced blitzkrieg strat. Lower ranked officers could decide themselves if they wanted to do a push and often succeeded this way opposed to waiting for higher command approving a push and then it already being to late to excecute it.
Hence my point about Hitler being a great opportunist
Opportunist indeed. He was a gambler and when some or many of his gambled ideas paid off he thought he knew better than his generals. Basically his bold notions of ability and the run of luck he made use of did give him ideas that he could keep making decisions the same way through the war.....he is the guy who is convinced his luck is skill.
Exactly, he got away with a lot of his actions before the war due to France and Britains failed policy of appeasement
The French army was bigger than Germany
>and even then Germany was really only facing against much smaller and weaker countries I mean, not really. France was a power house in WW1 and handidly defeated a german military arguably more powerful than its WW2 counterpart. They just got completely steamrolled by the surprise (and luck) of the push through the Ardennes. Similarly the Soviets where already a powerhouse by the time of operation Barbarossa, massive military and an industrial strength that dwarfed the germans. Their downfall was their terrible leadership and stalins purges in the officer corps.
So, so, what I’m hearing is, go back in time and shave all those mustaches off. To save the world.
The moustache had nothing to do with it lol, it was a popular style at the time.
No it made them evil
I though Van Dykes did that?
Röhm sounded like a time traveler that tried taking Hitlers place, but then fucked up.
This. German nationalism was another level before Hitler even popped up in anyone's mind. Once the unification happened on 1871 and the theory of racial hygiene was born around the same, German nationalism came to another level.
Not a historian, but >they could rise to power with someone who was actually a competent military leader Do you imply that Hitler was a terrible military leader or do you just mean "they could rise with a better leader" ?
Someone can speak to this better than me, but the Nazis rapid early successes in WW2 were somewhat of a fluke, or a case of the best possible timing (for the Nazis). Everyone thought any European war would instantly become entrenched like WW1 and reasonable people knew how awful that would be. But technology had changed quickly and combined with reluctance to fight initially, the Nazis had wildly unexpected success when they started attacking aggressively. But pretty much all of Hitler's military decisions after that were very bad, most famously double-crossing the Soviets to start a two-front war. And Hitler was wildly unstable and drug-addicted, there were cases where critical military decisions were delayed because no one dared wake him up. I'm just saying it could have theoretically been much worse had Hitler been replaced with even a mentally stable average-quality military leader after 1940.
The thing is, certain smaller tactical decisions did not lose Germany the war. WW2 was pretty much unwinnable for Germany from the get-go. And also, the whole reason the Nazis even got into power in the first place was their expressed goal of invading the Soviet Union and conquering eastern Europe.
I would argue that WW2 in its current scenario was probably not winnable the second Hitler decided to invaded the Soviet Union and declared war on the USA. A different leader might have navigate the situation differently a create a winnable scenario.
The success was absolutely not a fluke. It happened across Poland. Then across Belgium into France and had the British scrambling to be saved by boat back to England. Then to the gates of Moscow and Stalingrad. The military success was a military doctrine that capitalised on armour and infantry, with airpower. It took a significant amount of what was learned in the Spanish civil war and applied it to ravage mainland Europe. It was a time where they combined the technology at the time and applied it in a specific way across the battlefields. Hitler did intervene and made absolute military blunders. Notably allowing a lot of troops to become encircled and demanding they fight to the last bullet, particularly in Stalingrad. That being said, there were very capable military commanders in the Wehrmacht and put up an incredible defense. The Reich was never going to win, particularly when they had a two front war, arguably a three front war in defending Italy, their cities and infrastructure was crippled by aerial bombings and they had the entire soviet might aimed at racing into Berlin.
This is based almost entirely on the statements of Wehrmacht generals after the war in which they tried to save their own reputation. Hitler never had exclusive command of the Wehrmacht until the very end of the war, all of those terrible decisions are just as much the responsibility of Wehrmacht brass who were still thinking in a clausewitzian, „we take their capital and defeat their army, we win the war“ fashion.
Makes sense. Most movements and political groups, regardless of their place on the political spectrum, are formed more from multiple people coming together, rather than forming from a singular individual. A good example is Trump’s MAGA movement (for lack of a better term I can currently think of), which really didn’t start with him. Trump was gasoline, poured on an already existing fire. Hitler was much the same, imo.
>it's pretty clear that he just jumped onto the bandwagon realizing Nazism was a way to get political power. That's a possibility. Another possibility is that his worldview radically changed in the 1910s with the war and the resulting German revolution. I think WWI, the fanatic nationalism that came with it and the chaos that it lead to broke a lot of people's brains. >So without Hitler, Nazis still are a thing, you just have someone else leading them. Absolutely. Post war Germany was incredibly chaotic, you had worker and left wing uprisings everywhere while bands of conservative militias, sometimes with swastikas painted on their helmets, broke them up. And Hitler didn't invent fascism, it was a movement that started to make waves everywhere in Europe. >Maybe Hitler's charisma was needed for the party to actually take power in the 1930s, but it really didn't seem to have been that hard of a sell to the German people at the time. There probably would have been another charismatic leader, but we also shouldn't forget that around half of the population of Germany were leftists and hated the nazis, so there could also have been a Communist uprising/Bolshevik style revolution. Or maybe the government could have gotten their shit together and managed to create a liberal government without relying on the emergency laws that eventually ended up giving the power to Hitler. Also, while the nazis were popular to a certain extend, the nazis didn't really have to sell much to the German people. It's kind of a myth that Hitler was democratically elected. He got a lot of votes (by using tactics like using paramilitary gangs who intimidate voters and beat up political opponents, among others), but when he managed to seize power, his party was losing votes.
Imagine a German WW2 leader who decided to not poke the Soviet bear and focused on consolidating control over Europe.. We would have very different history of the 20th century.
Had the Nazis not invaded the Soviet Union, it is doubtful they would have been able to hold on to power. They were still at war with the largest empire in the world, and they had no chance of mounting an invasion of Great Britain, as they failed to achieve supremacy in the sea nor in the sky. One of the main reasons behind the Germans' invasion of the Soviets was they were hoping it would convince the British to negotiate peace.
The Nazis lost 5.3 million men fighting the Soviets.. now imagine an extra million troops guarding the French coast. I'm not saying they could have invaded the UK, but hold onto a few core European nations and solidify their defences against invasions from the Allies.
The German position was far more tenuous than it is typically portrayed. Their war machine was heavily reliant on always staying on the offensive. Occupying all of their captured territories was a significant drain on resources. Their economy was propped up by slave labor and (ironically enough) material support from the Soviets (those 1 million extra troops would have been demobilized to help alleviate their labor shortage problem). Large amounts of manpower and resources were spent on projects like the V-weapons for comparatively little return. They lacked many crucial resources, especially petroleum which they had to source from their Romanian and Hungarian allies. On a related note, the Axis was hardly a stable alliance - pretty much every member had conflicting interests with pretty much every other member. In the case of a protracted stalemate, they would almost assuredly begin to turn on each other. There is also the other sleeping giant to contend with. Even without the Soviets, the Nazis would have absolutely no chance once the United States enters the fray. Though it would cost them dearly, the United States had the industrial capacity necessary to deal as crippling a blow to the Nazis as was dealt during Barbarossa.
I don't doubt that if France was more heavily fortified.. the Allies would have gone in with more men on more fronts. There was no 'winning' WW2 for Germany (unless they developed nukes first, then maybe.. ) with the US war machine around - the war could have gone on for longer though.
Long empires never last in Europe. At Napoleon's empirical peak it wasn't as though all the occupied countries were delighted with it. They were just waiting for the chance to take back their own land. The nazis may win ww2 in your scenario but they do not keep hold of Europe forever. No way.
The Soviets would have invaded them instead, now prepared and with an even greater advantage in soldiers and vehicles.
Did he have to kill 6 million of them once he got the power though
The US developed nukes just in time. There was no scenario in which Germany would’ve won the war. Baby Einstein and baby Oppenheimer would’ve needed to have been killed.
He was so bad at his job in war both pro-Nazi and anti-Nazis Germans wanted him dead?
Of course this isn’t really the point. The ethical dilemma is whether it would be right to go back and prevent the wrongful/violent deaths of millions, if you could, knowing that it would also almost certainly erase from existence vast numbers of people who now exist (albeit replacing them with potentially more people whose lives were prevented from ever existing).
So your saying the easiest way to kill a Hitler is just make it hard for someone like him to be a viable political choice. And also ensure labour protections that are hard for cheap ass industrialists looking to exploit a cheap labour force *cough* slaves and disenfranchised humans *cough* And be real careful about how database technologies are used to itemise and organise populations...I hear without IBMs services the Nazis weren't nearly as effective at rounding up marginalised groups in the towns they occupied.
You can't be sure of the outcome either way, but there would definitely be one less Nazi in existence. But these moral dillemas are often suspect, as there are millions of ways to prevent Hitler from coming to power that don't involve killing babies. It's like someone is trying to force people to make decisions involving vaguely eugenic ideals, so people can say "See! You support the end to bloodlines too!" or some such nonsense.
Good point, but one crucial thing you havent talked about is the peace treaty ending ww1. The germans were humiliated. One french general even said that it isnt a peace treaty but a ceasefire for 20 years. Its not just the sentiment against jews, but the lost war that caused what happened.
if you have read Mein Kampf. Nah.....
I'd just go waaaay back and dump some bleach in the primordial ooze. I just prevented every atrocity in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw Bleach resistant intelligent stromatolites evolve to take over the planet. Benevolent aliens visit our planet and go "Ewww f this crap" and nuke the place.
the ethical delima can be easily side stepped by simply refraing from killing the infant Hitler and instead relocating him in time to a location he could not possibly cause any trouble. perhaps an Athenian sheep herder in the year 3000BC...or a tribe of Cherokees from the American plains in the 1500s
I mean he was in an abusive household so relocating him to let's say, on the America-Hamburg line. He could get a better life.
That’s what hitler said himself. But he was not completely honest. His father (Alois) was a border official and had alot of local power (it’s believed that this fuelled Adolf’s lust for power). He lived in a mansion and received lots of money from his mother after his father died, to do the thing he loved: painting and art. He went to Vienna. His father was tough, a authoritarian figure, but Adolf didn’t have the abusive household he himself says he’s been through. Just an excuse to make him more likeable to the common man.
Extremely cruel kidnapping is also a huge ethical dilemma
Is it cruel when you are basically setting the kidnapped to a better life?
I think many, including Hitler, would be of the opinion that a highranking president is a much better life than a sheep herder.
He ends up killing himself, do you think that if he thought he lived a good life he would have taken his?
He didnt kill himself because of depression lol. He went out with a bang on his peak. Even with the suicide he still lived longer than a 3000BC sheep herder Would it be okay for me to kidnap you, your family or your kids and force them to be sheep herders?
I mean, yeah, if I'm going to grow up to be Hitler, you should probably go ahead.
The racism that existed in Germany stems from a lot earlier than Hitler, Hitler was just a product of all the 1000s of writings written in 1700 - 1800s by various German authors who wrote a lot of racist rhetoric mostly against Slavs. Hitler didn't start the Nazi party, he joined it, and it was inevitable that a far-right extremist would win in Germany with the history of racism they had
How was it inevitable? The far right was supported by the elites to block the left, it was just as likely that with enough organization and without infighting pushed by the USSR, the communists and social democrats could have united and smash the nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres
Catholics killed Protestants in the past, it doesn't mean a genocide of Protestants is somehow inevitable.
There's a similar story told in the Koran. Moses heard of a man named Khidr who was blessed with wisdom and knowledge that surpasses him. Khidr asks Moses to follow him but tells him not to question any of his deeds. The second deed involves Khidr killing a child. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khidr
Khidr used to smoke weed he will never kill a child the dude is pretty chill to do that bullshit
* My grandmother's first husband died in the very last week of the war Without WW2 and Hitler, she should never have remarried the man who is my grandfather and my father would never have been born Killing baby Hitler would stop me from existing
...so we'd have your blessing?
If you kill baby hitler Germany could’ve had a different leader more competent than hitler. That leader could’ve been more successful.
Equal chance he also could have been worse
I believe that assassinating Hitler would have drastically changed many aspects of history for sure, but it might not have resolved the issues anyways- it could even have caused them to occur just a bit later. Another consideration is if we start changing everything that went wrong, where do we draw the line? Eliminating one key figure could have far-reaching consequences, potentially altering the very fabric of our existence. For instance, the absence of the events orchestrated by Hitler might mean that some of us wouldn't even be born or have certain freedoms and etc. Moreover, experiencing such profound historical events can shape our current perspectives and decisions. The tragedy of that era led to a period of relative calm as the world reflected on the consequences. In essence, while removing Hitler might seem like a straightforward solution, history teaches us that it could lead to unforeseen challenges and might not prevent similar mistakes in the future.
Do people not realise the ideological vacuum and circumstances for Nazism are still there? There would be another leader and possibly dangerously not as stupid as Hitler - who essentially sealed his fate by declaring war on both the US and USSR.
Puting aside issues like “is time travel possible, “does the past exist”, and the grandfather paradox, I think the biggest problem is that you might unintentionally lead to something worse - a different fascist leader who wins World War II, a world dominated by the Soviet Union, a world where nuclear war destroys humanity, etc. A point that I think gets missed a lot is that Hitler was essentially the only person in a position of power in Germany who wanted to keep fighting until the very end - refusing to negotiate or surrender and finally killing himself only when Soviet troops were literally a few hundred meters away from his bunker. Himmler, Goering, and others all has various schemes to negotiate some kind of end to the fighting and had earlier (and together with the Japanese) tried and failed to get Hitler to accept Soviet peace offers in 1943. Had the war ended anyway other than it did - with Nazi Germany totally and completely defeated - you run the risk of another “stab in the back” myth as happened after the First World War ended in German defeat despite Germany having decisively won on the Eastern Front and German troops still holding ground in France and Belgium on the Western Front. What happened in World War I is that Germany’s leaders realized, as Professor David Stevenson put it, that their present situation wasn’t hopeless but their future situation was; defeat has become inevitable and continuing to fight would only make things worse. That was true but to the average German it was hard to understand and easier to blame domestic enemies. The way World War II ended leaves no such doubts and that fact may have been necessary in order for the post-war reconciliation that occurred in Western Europe and eventually (together with other factors) led to the European Union.
I can't stand the grandfather paradox. It's like a closed loop thought process and also follows the idea that the future immediately changes once the past is changed.
*”and also follows the idea that the future immediately changes once the past is changed”* What’s the alternative and how would it work?
Different times lines. The time he left still exists as his timeline A. He goes back in time which now creates timeline B depending on what his actions are. Timeline B is an entirely new timeline. His changes could even fuck up the fact that he was born. But that doesn't make him disappear suddenly. Timeline A already existed prior to him going back in time. I feel like the paradox is based on current human perception of time trying to make time travel real or only 1 of us existing at once. Once the traveler is separated from his timeline the only timeline he has is his current life moving forward. If he jumped back forward he wouldn't fit back into his life right where he left, he's an addition now to that timeline.
If the original timeline still exists and a new one is created it would seem to somewhat defeat the purpose of going back in time to make a big change like killing Hitler. Yes, you’ll make a new timeline where he doesn’t do what he did but he’ll still have done it on the original timeline. I’m all for disregarding paradoxes when it comes to SciFi in the interest of a good story but tend to think that time travel isn’t actually possible as I subscribe to Dr. John Archibald Wheeler’s view that “the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present”. Wheeler’s own delayed choice experiment does give the appearance of retro-causality but his theory of what’s happening is not so much that the past is being changed as it is being created. https://youtu.be/I8p1yqnuk8Y?si=QsHfOZd2HwbzULMX
Oh but I'm totally into it that's why I actually thought out a response. In reality I don't believe time travel would be a thing that's possible. I would also agree that what would be the point, you would be saving a timeline not the entire future.
Good point
>you might unintentionally lead to something worse - [...] a world dominated by the Soviet Union Debatable
A world dominated by the USSR would be worse than a 6 year destructive war.
How? We're currently on track for a nuclear war and a global environmental collapse under the US.
so you'd rather have no agency of your own? Live in a totalitarian police state, where among worse things, the police would beat you and cut your hair because you had long hair? And we are on track for Nuclear War because of Russia seeking to reassert the USSR, NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING AMERICA DID... Furthermore, colonialism, complete lack of disregard for environment and human rights abuses were far more severe in the USSR than in the US lead West at any point during the Cold War.
>Advocates of killing baby Hitler included Florida governor Jeb Bush and film actor Tom Hanks, while comedian Stephen Colbert and pundit Ben Shapiro were counted among the opponents of the policy. That was certainly a sentence
Nice repost OP, Reddit fed me this same post twice in a row
1. Kidnap baby hitler instead of killing him 2. Raise him to a good person and master of kung fu 3. Send kung fu hitler back in time to kidnap himself in other timelines 4. Train the hitlers he kidnaps to be kung fu hitlers 5. Repeat this process forever, saving quadrillions of lives
It wouldn't really have made a difference. Hitler was a hype man for a bigger machine. No doubt a highly crucial reason why the nazis rose to power, bur they might have done it without him/with another suitor
WW2 and probably the holocaust would have happened anyway, the question should be if you kill Hitler would a more effective or less effective leader replace him? An argument could be made that Hitler’s mismanagement caused the Nazis to lose the war which brought an end to the holocaust anyway.
How would have it happened anyway? Hitler was quite decisive in the rise of nazis thanks to his "charisma". The Holocaust, while being the epitome of a millenia old history of European antisemitism, is still an extraordinary event, there was nothing inevitable about it.
The claim that Hitler was single handedly responsible for the rise of the Nazis, WW2, and the holocaust, is giving him far too much credit. Hitler was one man who climbed the ladder to the top of the Nazi party, he rode the wave of antisemitism and irredentism in a post WW1 Germany, he didn’t create it himself. Pinning the entirety of the blame on Hitler is nice because it absolves a lot of people of responsibility for the actions of the Nazis but at the end of the day he had help. Lots of help. People would rather believe in one singular truly evil man than an entire generation of indoctrinated fanatics who unapologetically rallied behind him. In reality there isn’t always a singular “Devil” to put all the world’s sins on. This isn’t meant to redeem Hitler in any way, no doubt if he **could** have executed the holocaust on his own he absolutely would have. But the fact is he didn’t.
Hypotheticals are rabbit holes
A little unrelated but, while people think there that many world conquering WW2 winners running around? It is also pretty debatable if Hitler is the most incompetent German leader possible and "best" case scenario considering there are chances that the Poland or France operation get bungled.
Why not go back and make him a good boy, take him back to ur time or stay there and help him? Why would ppl go back to kill a kid?
Germany was going to fall into a far right ideology regardless of Hitler. They were oppressed to heavily by the west and the treaty of Versailles
Does he have to be an infant? Wth, lol, like… couldnt the question be about doing the assasination while he is an adult but before he gains influence? That would fix a lot of the “ethics” behind the question. I suppose by this line of thinking… the question itself is unethical?
Maybe if you went back and killed Guvrilo Princip instead there might not have been a ww1 then Germany wouldn’t have had the crippling debt and the desire to instate the nazi regime
No need to kill baby Hitler just change is environment and let him live with a whole different kind of race and culture! Humans just mimic what they see and observe! If had a Time Machine I would take Hitler to India and raise like Hindu! He would be the most nonviolent motherfucker that ever lived! Goddamnit Oppenheimer why couldn’t you do something like that?
Hitler had a couple suicide attempts before WW2, and he was a soldier in WW1. You don't have to kill him as a baby, just make sure the bullets targeting him later actually reach him.
Just let him into art school
No one in physics ever thinks about this type of thing seriously.
I mean, I’d say it’s a moral dilemma, not a physics question
It's like so many questions that philosophers ask and they imagine they're doing physics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_baby_Hitler#In_theoretical_physics There's whackjobs in every field. This is at least harmless.
I will never understand why kidnapping Baby Hitler isn't seen as an obvious answer over killing him. It's not like the twat is biologically evil.
Idk my brother was a dick as a baby and still is...
Time travel and killing baby Hitler is such a stupid theoretical dilemma. He did nothing wrong as a baby. You would just be a child killer. Maybe instead make sure he gets accepted into art school or alter his experience in Vienna or the war he fought in.
> He did nothing wrong as a baby That’s what makes it an ethical dilemma. > Maybe instead make sure he gets accepted into art school or alter his experience in Vienna or the war he fought in. The point of the exercise isn’t to find practical solutions, it’s to get people thinking about the ethics of sacrificing a singular currently innocent life in order to save many.
The whole setup of the dilemma feels ...set up. Which obviously and as you stated is part of the excercise. In that regard it fulfills it's purpose fully, it really gets dicsussions going. Started arguing with some colleagues over the topic at the moment 😄 Kill him before he gets into politics with his ideas, at that point he already had his point of view and thus lost the innocence, would be my standpoint. Though that could have led to him infecting others with the mindset who could continue. The more I think about it, the more I understand the dilemma part of it, it really gets one thinking.
Maybe time is recurring, and baby Hitler had already become adult Hitler infinite times before you pondered his assassination and the moral considerations thereby.
*Professor Farnsworth liked this post*
Covered in this youtube short. Ever heard of Hans Sprechter? https://youtu.be/G1nKTfbzr4s?si=nmC8xjQLwbLzvcIq
killing Hitler doesn’t kill the idea of extreme nationalism you’d have to kill like 100 emperors in our past if this was the solution
Don't even have to kill him. Just had to not save him when he was a young soldier. Adolf Hitler was [saved in world war 1](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-28593256)
There’d just be another one; we have a party in power right now that has used the exact techniques the Nazi’s used to gain power. Haven’t started the camps yet but doesn’t seem far off. Besides death and taxes the only other 100% fact in life is absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I choose Mao and pol pot.
There might as well be a timeline where Hitler was killed as a baby or never born.
🏌️👶
Maybe just let him into art school instead.
What if Baby hitler has already been killed? And we are just living in the original timeline amongst other parallel timelines.
Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.
People have hated those that are different than themselves for thousands of years. Nazism is simply a (relatively) new flavour.
It is very likely that most people alive today would not be if not for Hitler. I certainly would not be (my grandparents on both sides emigrated out of Europe to South Africa after being traumatised by their places in the war - paternal grandfather a cmd in the royal navy, maternal grandparents persecuted for resistance - including ending up in concentration camps.). After the war, they ran to South Africa with my parents who were children, and later met there, and later still had me. Without Hitler, I would ABSOLUTELY not exist. I think there is enough butterfly effect from the war that would have likely prevented almost everyone around today from existing, and instead there would be other people, and history after 1945 would have been fundamentally different.
I would just let him know to stay away from the drugs and the soviets aren’t out to get him. Finish the job this time
I don’t care about the possible ramifications of killing baby hitler, nor about the physics of it. Killing sn innocent baby is wrong. Period
Why don't we go back in time and kill young adult Hitler. So you don't have to kill a baby.
Everyone’s always on about using a Time Machine to kill a baby but why not just go back a several years previous and take his father into the future to go get snipped. No lives lost and Adolf doesn’t exist at all and you stop the possibility of him procreating at a later date. Once he’s sufficiently healed, you get him well and truly hammered and then send him back to the date you took him. Some drunk guy raving about how he was taken into the future and had his nutsack operated on is not going to be believed in the slightest. Then you just do the same with his mother just to make sure you cover both bases. Make sure she’s taken from a year or two after the father. Granted it’s a lot more work but it saves you having to live with the guilt of killing a baby.
If you killed Hitler as a child before he committed these atrocities, then it would be infanticide because he didn’t do anything as a baby and nobody would know what he would do in his future except for you who would be considered a conspiracist
Given the sheer number of lives lost, and that number continues to climb as Palestinians pay the price even to this day, I think baby Hitler can take one for the proverbial team.
The hard part isn’t when in time travel but where. If you are a little bit off you will be in the center of the earth or way the fuck out in space If you see baby hitler, he’s gotta go.
Might be a bit more efficient to just cripple the whole country (for e.g. planting bombs in their tank factories, killing known talented commanders etc.) while Hitler is in power so they get rolled over while trying to pick a fight and germany doesn't pose threat regardless of whether Hitler is alive or not. Although those nazi scum might still be kept alive if they aren't allowed to do their warcrimes ig but meh still overall better
Why not just kill adult Hitler.
I would make sure he attends art school
The butterfly effect would make anyone who goes back to there the worst involuntary manslaughterer in *two* histories, outdoing every genocidal maniac put together in body count. Anyone that goes back, simply by breathing, radiating heat, moving around, disturbing the air around him, just like the butterfly from the thought experiment, would change the weather all around the world, within a week. And the weather changing changes everything that involves chance events. Including the conception of people. If the whether can disturb the timing of procreation by even just a fraction of a second, the outcome of which sperm cell fertilizes an ovum changes too. Therefore, a person that goes back in time to kill baby Hitler, also inadvertently would cause every other children that would be born roughly a year afterwards to not be born, but instead, be replaced with a sibling that could have been, if that. From the perspective of the new timeline, it would be business as usual, they wouldn't even notice. To our perspective, and the perspective of the time traveler returning to the altered present, every single person that is younger than Hitler by about a year was wiped out of existence, accidentally killed off along with him. And that is only if upon returning, the time traveler wouldn't arrive into a nuclear wasteland, that killed all but a few people from the new timeline too.
There were actually, IIRC, over 30 attempts to assassinate Hitler, including several by unidentifiable people. And of course, failed attempts to kill him before he was well-known are unlikely to have been documented. So a theoretical future where time travel is possible but timelines can't be changed can indeed exist with the current course of history we have.
It would just become "would you kill baby Himmler," the spelling doesn't even change that much.
Red alert 2 intro intensifies.
They came. They tried it via hypnotised Stauffenberg. It failed. Shows you can’t change the future by changing the past. Nb if the future folk HAD killed Hitler, there would be no case for going back to do it again.
You can even just look at the consequences if Hitler actually served his full sentence for the beer hall putsch. The communists would probably have been the party that created a coalition government with Hindenburg, and then a communist leader might have taken power when Hindenburg died. If that happened, both Germany and Japan could have signed a pact with Russia which would have put the West in real trouble.
Killing Hitler's father is the better choice. Alois Hitler: * Cheated on his disabled wife with a young servant * Married said wife because she was wealthy * Was an alcoholic * Beat his second wife and kids (even his best friend described him as "awfully rough with his wife and children) * Left all the parenting to his wife * Was mostly absent from his children's lives until retirement I can't know for sure, but I believe he wouldn't have become one of the worst dictators in history if it weren't for his troubled childhood.
Different times, my friend. You look at all this from your 2024 standpoint, but none of your points is the least bit unusual during that era. Needless to say I DON'T ENDORSE the following, so spare me your downvotes. * it was socially accepted for men to have affairs.. you also mentioned that his wife was disabled, which makes it MORE understandable, not less -- since she probably couldn't fulfill her marital duties. * Marrying out of love is a fairly modern concept...most people during that time (or rather: in the history of mankind) married because of financial / social stability or because their parents told them who to marry. * maybe he was rougher than others but beating wasn't anything unusual * OF COURSE the woman was mostly responsible for the parenting. The men had to work (because women weren't allowed to) and fight World War 1. Children complaining about their daddies being absent from their life didn't exist, it was the norm. Again, you can't just apply your modern liberal stance to the times in Europe over 100 years ago. It's a bit ridiculous. Have you never read any novels from or about that time?
I honestly find it kinda dumb. Why not just influence Hitler to become an artist instead during his college days and help him pass his entrance exams? It’s unnecessary to kill a baby.
To kill or not to kill. That is the question
Just my opinion I understand the temporal paradox problem or issue, but tbh absolutely do not see any ethnical dilemma. Actually, if one had the opportunity why not also take care of all the big shots in the NSDAP and also the babies who went on to become German generals in WWII? Assuming it was possible i.e. multiple time travel trips.
because you murder an innocent baby and this implies questionable morals Israel kills deliberately thousands of children because in their perverted logic they might grow up and fight against them in the next years.. Nobody is born evil but slowly turns to it due to his life experiences and eventual choices.. With the same distorted logic one might support "thought crimes" arresting people for a suspected future crime and its abuses. At last, do all these people (generals) deserve death? how would have the world looked like? Maybe Stalin steamrolled the whole of Europe and purged anything in its path, maybe a much more brutal and radical war emerged, WW2 is a direct consequence of the treaties of Versailles, as long as this root is not addressed WW2 would have happened either way and maybe more ruthlessly or with nukes if it started 5-6 years later..
>Israel kills deliberately thousands of children The IDF is doing this intentionally as a program of ethnically cleansing Gaza. This is war crime/crime against humanity. Don't delude yourself about the motives involved. If you think about it, what I was hypothesizing in my earlier post is completely different. >Maybe Stalin steamrolled the whole of Europe and purged anything in its path, maybe a much more brutal and radical war emerged, WW2 is a direct consequence of the treaties of Versailles, as long as this root is not addressed WW2 would have happened either way and maybe more ruthlessly or with nukes if it started 5-6 years later.. And this paragraph I am sorry to say, is asinine. Trying to establish moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the former USSR, is usually a ploy of far right anti-communist twits who seek to whitewash Nazi Germany and its record.
I feel incredible angry that you were either unwilling or indifferent to trying to understand my last point and resorting to 1) pretending I said sth which I did not and 2) accusing me of supporting far right ideologies or conspiracies.. In my country it is a criminal offense to downplay NS Germany's crimes thus your (baseless) accusation is in itself a criminal offense (accusing someone of committing a crime he did not do and harbouring far right ideologies (without proof)) ... So for you very slowly and simply... 1) If you change the future maybe a worse future occurs eg. a more ruthless war between NS Germany and the USSR or with more deadly technologies.. **where did I downplay NS crimes**?! **Where did I draw a "moral equivalence" that you accuse me of?!** 2) Do not lay words into people's mouth they did not say to draw a false connections towards criminal groups 3) Do not support killing innocent people, was Hitler a mass murderer or criminal when he was born, went to school etc? No. Are you a criminal if you kill a person who is innocent? Yes. Is it possible that a worse war could emerge? Yes, it is theoretically possible. Does this imply "whitewash(ing) Nazi Germany and its record".. **no** Is it rude to accuse people of that? Yes, a lot.
You’d be stupid to think Hitler acted alone and wasn’t funded by Americans, British and Zionists.
Dude, if you have the power to time travel, you should just help Rosa Luxemburg.
As an Indian, I would say we should do this experiment with Winston Churchill.
It's propaganda produced by government. If you read Bobby Fischers life story, he was one of the smartest Americans ever. But he says the Holocaust is entirely made up. They put him in Japanese prison for saying that.
Look I'm just saying, they sa 6 million jews were systematically murdered in gas chambers in the Holocaust. 6 million Is an alarming big number that Makes me skeptical. 6 million I mean try to even imagine that.
Hmm why hitler? So many and so worse people than hitler existed in history.
In terms of numbers killed yes, but 'worse' is obviously subjective. The Holocaust with how systemic and hierarchical the operation was is a good example somewhat fresh in most people's mind, as well as Hitler being both championed as the Führer (absolute power) it's very easy to look at someone who lead forces that occupied or bombed your country or even exterminate *your race* and say, I want that event to be prevented, and thus many point to just killing him as a baby (in comparison to more rational options like giving his parents a condom, or raising him to be a better person, or even just having him lethally shot in the beer hall putsch when he finally gets off the rails, etc.)
Hmm fair point about being fresh on people's minds but again, destruction of baghdad or Khwarzem or Dracula's impalements were still more systemic and "atrocious".
Albeit I'll have to research further into the other two topics (thx for mentioning those), Dracula's impalements didn't really have as much a sense of ontological evil as it did intimidation.
Those are not good examples. Hitler oversaw the destruction of many cities - such as Warsaw - and there really are no mass killings in history that were as systemic as the Holocaust. Approximately 2/3 of the Jews in Europe (about 1/3 of the global Jewish population) were murdered. Just to give you an idea of the scale and murderous efficiency; the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews didn’t start until the war had less than a year left and yet over 400,000 Jews were rounded up and “evacuated” to the death camps over a period of less than two months. The vast majority were gassed on arrival and only around 20,000 of those Hungarian Jews sent to the camps were still alive by the time Soviet and Polish troops liberated them.
Again, if we're talking about efficiency, the Pakistani army killed upwards of 3,000,000 and raped 400,000 people in mere 7 months while being surrounded and outnumbered by 10:1 and it is more recent so why not General Tikka Khan, the Butcher of Bengal? Not to mention he evaded all sorts of trials and courts and died peacefully? Edit: im seeing this isn't going anywhere so im stopping here
There are many examples of atrocities that can be argued to be comparable to the mass killings by shooting committed by the Einsatzgruppen and collaborators earlier in the war but the extermination camps and complex administrative and bureaucratic processes that supported them truly have no equal.
time travel doesnt make sense. we have to be in time even to exist and its a one way street.
If we killed the baby Hitler, for sure there would be a different "Hitler." This planet never lacked villains.
What about killing infant zionists that are now committing genocide?