"Would You Kill Young Hitler?" Topic

If you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Hitler before he could lead the Nazis? Men and women both see the benefits of such an act, but men seem more likely to pull the trigger, the Independent reports.

Researchers came to this conclusion by poring over the answers 6,100 people gave to a range of moral questions that involve committing harm for the greater good, including the Hitler question.

"Women seem to be more likely to have this negative, emotional, gut-level reaction to causing harm to people … whereas men were less likely to express this strong emotional reaction to harm," says lead author Rebecca Friesdorf…

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Why is this always pitched at the killing level ? Why not debate with him and persuade him to a more compassionate world view?

Too time consuming ? Not really – you have a time machine. Perhaps take a team of social workers, psycholgists and psychatrists with you.

If it fails and he still grows up to be an unpleasant adult then just keep appearing next to him at rallys dressed as a giant banana. Or drop buckets of slops on his head (time machine remember – you can appear and disappear at will). He'll look an idiot and wont be taken seriously.

And if he starts complaining that people from the future are trying to discredit him then ..well, who'll believe that ?

Just shooting him as a child is such a lazy response.

How about this, show him the future where he died terribly and brought his beloved country to ruin. Recruit him into the time corps to prevent others from doing the same. [Come on you know you want to play a game where Hitler is a PC trying to stop disasters.] :-)

Send the lad to art school.

Of course I would kill him.

Tandey was mentioned five times in dispatches and certainly earned his VC during the capture of the French village and crossing at Marcoing, his regiment held down by heavy machine gun fire Tandey crawled forward, located the machine gun nest and took it out. Arriving at the crossing he braved heavy fire to place wooden planks over a gaping hole enabling troops to roll across and take the battle to the Germans, the day still not over he successfully led a bayonet charge against outnumbering enemy troops which helped bring hostilities to an end. As the ferocious battle wound down and enemy troops surrendered or retreated a wounded German soldier limped out of the maelstrom and into Private Tandey's line of fire, the battle weary man never raised his rifle and just stared at Tandey resigned to the inevitable. "I took aim but couldn't shoot a wounded man," said Tandey, "so I let him go." Tandey was haunted the remainder of his life by his good deed, the simple squeeze of a trigger would have spared the world a catastrophe which cost tens of millions of lives. He was living in Coventry when the Luftwaffe destroyed the city in 1940, sheltered in a doorway as the building he was in crumbled and city burned like a scene from Dante's Inferno. He was also in London during the Blitz and experienced that atrocity first hand, he told a journalist in 1940, "if only I had known what he would turn out to be. When I saw all the people, woman and children he had killed and wounded I was sorry to God I let him go".

I'd just keep him in jail when he was first arrested.

just keep appearing next to him at rallys dressed as a giant banana.

Now that is quite the visual….

Why is this always pitched at the killing level ? Why not debate with him and persuade him to a more compassionate world view?

I do not get that either. As a kid, he didn't do anything wrong. As a soldier during World War I, he only did his duty. Tell either of them what their future self would do, and I wouldn't be surprised if kid Hitler and Corporal Hitler would both be horrified. But we are just the sum of our life experiences, and perhaps minor tweaks would have made Hitler a decent artist, or perhaps a professional housepainter, and some guy named Hartler would show up and fix the Mark, prolonging the Depression. Unless you believe in predestination.

Kill him and move on.

Such "thought experiments" are pointless.

No one from the future is going to go back and kill/change Hilter.

Why?

Because they haven't.

Remember, if you kill him about 50% of this hobby vanishes. Just sayin' …

How about going back in time to get him out of the nightmare family he had so he wouldn't grow up to be a depraved monster.

I think those two mallards might have something to say about this.

Because they haven't.

At least not in our universe.

How do you know that by killing him another wouldn't take his place and cause the very same events?

"And if he starts complaining that people from the future are trying to discredit him then ..well, who'll believe that ?"

The type of people who believe anti-vaxxers the more they are discredited?

"How do you know that by killing him another wouldn't take his place and cause the very same events?"

Thank you Doctor Pangloss :)

I haven't anything to add directly to this discussion, other than that German rappers have thoughtfully dealt with this issue:

YouTube link

(seriously, German hip-hop; it's a thing)

Certainly Stalin did more or less the same thing in the Soviet Union.

I don't think that killing him would prevent either the war or the holocaust. Hitler was certainly a useful tool of the movement but the movement was powerful and big.

Because they haven't.

At least not in our universe.

Are you so certain? Perhaps they have, but preservationist historians keep coming back to reset history, in a never-ending battle of zealots vs. preservationists that plays out unseen and unrecorded, yet nevertheless grand in scope.

Or maybe it's a future ego-trip; go back in time, kill Hitler, then go back and stop yourself, ad infinitum.

I'd prefer to go back to the night his mum and dad got close and give one of them a headache……

Parizal, you're making my head hurt…

If one was a pacifist sort, maybe help him get into art school? His paintings weren't /that/ awful.

Buy some of his paintings. That's all he ever wanted anyway.

I believe evil begets evil. An evil act of murder could never result in any kind of victory for good no matter how reasonable it might seem.

Now give me a sniper rifle within …oh that lines been used already…

Versailles still happened so the conditions were still the same in Germany, someone would have stepped up to tell the people to fight back. Maybe the new guy wouldn't have interfered in the generals plans and the Germans might have actually forced an armistice with initial gains. Would the Holocaust have still happened? Probably, to some extent, everyone loves a scapegoat for their troubles. There were plenty of anti Jewish laws independent of Germany, in Italy and Hungary for example.
No war and Britain keeps the Empire, America and Russia don't become superpowers, at least not so quick. Who would the next war be between, maybe expansionist America and Imperial Britain, maybe with France and Japan as allies protecting their imperial assets from the newcomer. How many would die then? Be careful what you wish for.

Why Hitler Roehm and Himmler were bigger monsters. Stalin and Mussolini would still be alive….

I would teach him how to paint, so he could have been admitted in the Vienna art school.

Hitler is murdered in 1919.

Stalin attacks the West in 1941 and Communism takes over all of Europe.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

And I would kill Young Stalin too.

I have to admit, the idea of killing a child because of events that occurred in our current timeline just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Wouldn't need to be child Hitler.

Appear in WW1 and shoot him in the trenches.

Still, I agree with others that it is a simplistic and sloppy solution.

And I think Hawking has proved that time-travel disobeys the laws of conservation of energy or something anyway.

Cheers,
JohnG

What if the reason Hitler turns evil is that you go back in time, botch the assassination attempt and it messes with his head?

The timeline reinforces itself.

Don't think The Doctor would like this idea…….is that Hawking chap the Aussie Olympic rower again? He does get about a bit.

According to the Great Man Theory of the 19th century, history is made by "special persons". Would this be true, then killing (or influencing) Hitler would make sense. Unfortunately this theory has been discarded long ago and changed for the fact that people are influenced by their surroundings and not the other way around. Therefore removing or influencing one (or some) persons does not change history much. With or without Hitler, World War Two is inevitable. And remember that Hitler did not start WW II completely on his own. So would you want to kill Tojo c.s. (starts in China) and Stalin c.s. (starts in Poland) too ?

Hawksbill Station.

Good run down of some of the potential issues with trying to go back in time and kill Hitler here:

link

We shot Adler, we poisoned Böhler, we drowned Everhardt, set Fischer on fire, put a bomb in Geier's pillow, stabbed Giehl, buried Haase alive, hanged Hermann, cut the brakes on Jollenbeck's car, dragged Kassmeyer before the firing squad, teleported Kuhn into the sun, gave Mann ebola, imploded Papke, threw Ritter into a shark tank, buried Schmidt in concrete and made Vogel into a Damian Hirst artwork. All were worse than Hitler …

+1 dBerczerk, but the cometh the hour cometh the man. Its a silly argument and having not read the article (honest) who's to say that it wasn't AH who was in the time machine. Again and again and again.

As Red Dwarf has shown, it was JFK in the time machine trying to kill HIS younger self. First from the Grassy Knoll…

Has anyone seen Looper?

It worked out reasonably well IRL, I would be concerned that it might turn out worse if I reset.

I might go for killing Mao, though.
-Kle.

I believe evil begets evil. An evil act of murder could never result in any kind of victory for good no matter how reasonable it might seem.

Right. So everyone should have just surrendered to Hitler (etc.) instead of fighting.

Good plan.
-Kle.

So everyone should have just surrendered to Hitler (etc.) instead of fighting.

First of all lets not get our knickers in a twist over such an absurd proposition

Secondly, so YOU are defining that the heroism of the beaches of Normandy for example was "an evil act of murder".

That's not how I view it.

A Just War which you will find has fairly well defined universally set criteria does not constitute "evil act of murder" in my opinion.
Murdering an individual who hasn't yet perpetuated a crime yet does, in my opinion.

Good plan.

Even better one is actually reading what someone says without trying to sound clever.

Yes

I think there was a Twilight Zone episode(1980's or '90's version) that dealt with a modern era woman going back in time to Braunau,Austria late 1800's and meeting little Adolf and his parents. She's faced with the above dilemma.

I wouldn't like to mess too much with the past even if I had the power to do so.

Killing Hitler before his rise to power for example might just have far more repercussions then killing one crazy. Even if it did spare us from the WW2 that we know and love what's to say that a more effective German leader and tactician won't have taken his place and actually do things right. Are people here so naïve to believe that there wouldn't have been a WW2 without a Adolf Hitler ever been born? Well we wouldn't have had our exact WW2 but do people here believe he was solely responsible for a worldwide conflict on this planet in the 20th century?

BTW I think it is humorous to imagine that by actually stopping the WW2 that we know many individuals posting here might suddenly cease to exist….wasn't the war responsible for many marriages, births etc…just might mean that as you squeeze that trigger you vanish from all thought and existence!

Actually on second thoughts, can I change my answer ;)

I would have made sure the art teacher who critiqued him rather harshly was fired and then perhaps he would have just gone on to a career as a moody artist.

Of course – there is the issue of time itself not really existing…

It's been stated by some (controversially, of course) that perception of time is really just the result of the decay of matter and energy and nothing more that a human construct. Since what was no longer exists, you can't go home again…