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Godwins Law Of Time Travel
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Dammit! I knew I shouldn't have left that tap running back in 1932...
The first rule of time travel is that any and all modifications made to the timeline result in Hitler winning World War II. Run over a hippy in 1968? Hitler wins.
—colonel_green of ScansDaily
You return home from your jolly time travel adventure in ancient Greece, having saved the world and being careful not to upset history and.. hold on a moment? Are those swastikas?! Looks like you've been hit by Godwin's Law of Time Travel.
Talked to the wrong person? Nazi victory! Left technology back before the dinosaurs were wiped out? Nazi victory! Stepped on a bug? Nazi victory! Prevented a Nazi victory? Nazi victory!
About the only time travel that doesn't result in a Nazi Victory is traveling to the future... unless a Neo Nazi steals your timetravel pod from you to help out Hitler.
The strangest thing about Time Travel is probably that a) the Nazis winning WWII is the most common accidental timeline shift and b) that will usually be the only change in the new timeline. It almost seems like Germany was supposed to win, and that history is trying to snap back to its original form. Perhaps Germany actually won, and a neo-ally traveled back in time to make sure the allies won by making Hitler depressed or something.
It is worth noting that Nazi Germany was actually pretty severely outclassed in the war, and a Nazi victory is nearly impossible after the entry of the United States, even if its contribution is as secondary as it was in our timeline. If it's Germany vs. the Soviet Union one on one, it's about an even fight, but even then the Russian winter, the greater Soviet population, and its willingness to use women more extensively in the war effort will still arguably put Mother Russia over the edge. Even invading Britain, the smallest and arguably weakest of the 'Big Three', isn't as certain a clear victory for Germany as it would seem; many authors like to give Germany a win over Britain with 'Operation Sealion', the proposed invasion of Britain, apparently unaware that it was actually one of the most flawed invasion plans in military history. A Japanese victory in the Pacific meanwhile is quite honestly not possible no matter how many battles they win. The numbers are just stacked against the Axis. See this page for just how much.
Similar stories can be told with other past war-losers and faded empires. The Confederacy, the Soviets, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Egyptians and the colonial-era British are all possibilities. The Nazis are by far the most dominant in this field, however.
The inversion of this is Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act.
Examples
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Comic Books
- Before Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC Comics's Earth-X was an alternate earth where the Nazis won.
- After 52, Earth-X is reborn as Earth-10. The Superman of Earth-10 is named Overman and is rather upset that he came into his powers after the Nazis won; there's nothing for it but to turn the Nazi Empire into as much of a Utopia as he can make it.
- Marvel Universe: Hauptmann Englande was a version of Captain Britain from an alternate universe where the Nazis won WWII.
Film
- Movies: The Philadelphia Experiment II.
- Averted in all of the Back To The Future movies. None of Marty and the Doc's travels through time even raised mention of the Nazis let alone altered Nazi or WWII history.
- The second movie altered American history, though. Richard Nixon got elected for his fifth term, after promising to end the Vietnam war soon.
Literature
- Inverted twice in the novel The Proteus Operation, where people from an Alternate Universe go back in time to _help_ the Nazis get elected in the first place and give them help to modernize their armies, and then again from the resulting dystopia to stop them from winning the war. The result is our universe.
- The original universe had the league of nations work. Fascism was a fad with Hitler's arrest after the Beer Hall Putsch being the end. A mixture of remaining Tyrants and power brokers, seeking a world more their liking helped fund a time machine. They got back to 1923 and helped Hitler. Eventually they gave him the bomb and jet aircraft to take down the Soviet Union. Hitler threw an atomic weapon into their time portal and by 1975 ruled everything but the Americas and Japan. Then Americans, using stolen German information create a weaker time portal and go back to 1939 and shut off the time portal supporting Hitler.
- In Animorphs: Elfangor's Secret, the protagonists are chasing a rabble rouser through time in attempt to prevent or correct any alterations to the time line he may have caused. The trope is subverted when the villain attempts to ensure a Nazi victory, only to discover that, due to his previous tampering, there are no Nazis, and Hitler's just a shmuck driving a VIP's jeep. There is still a WWII of some sort with a properly timed D-Day, but the details of the circumstances aren't given.
- Also, the US don't exist (another country exist in its place) and France has allied with Germany.
- Ray Bradbury's A Sound Of Thunder has a time traveler stepping on a butterfly in the Mesozoic era cause a fascist dictator type to win an election. Not actual Nazis, though. But the dictator's name is Deutscher, which seems close enough, particularly for a story written in 1952.
- Tom Strong uses an interesting variation - the ancient empire that survived wasn't the Roman, it was the Aztec!
- The Connie Willis novel To Say Nothing Of The Dog, in which the disappearance of an obscure item of Victoriana in an English cathedral leads to the Nazis winning WW 2.
- At least, the protagonists fear that to be true.
- The book Making History features the protagonist sending a pill to cause male sterility back to the water supply of the village where Hitler would be born, erasing him from existence. Naturally, his absence during an incident in the trenches of the First World War results in the survival of a German soldier who would normally die, and he goes on to become a fascist, anti-Semitic dictator anyway—except he's smarter than Hitler, so he wins World War Two. The protagonist wakes up the next day and finds that he's in New Jersey rather than England, his grandparents having fled England in the face of a Nazi invasion. Major changes this has on the United States are that the anti-Communist paranoia during the Cold War is shifted against the Nazis, and that homosexuality is outlawed. This world also has much more advanced computing and electronics, for unknown reasons. There are a variety of other small differences mentioned.
- If I recall correctly, in one of the Pendragon books, the reason they ended up NOT saving the Hindenburg from exploding was because doing so would, of course, cause Nazis to win.
- Averted in Philip Roth's alternate history The Plot Against America. In a book specifically about America voting in an anti-semitic president and forming an amicable relationship with Hitler in the early days of World War II, America eventually changes its mind and enters the war anyway. The Nazis lose pretty much exactly how they did in real life.
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- Tabletop RPG: The alternate universe "Reich 5" in GURPS.
- Reich-5 is a bit too well-thought-out to fit this trope: It was caused by FDR getting assassinated in 1933 and Charles Lindbergh becoming President, not meddling time-travelers. Likewise, Reich-2 was caused by Churchill not becoming Prime Minister of the UK; Reich-3 was caused by Japan attacking a Russian target instead of Pearl Harbor, and so on. Additionally, "Nazi victory" scenarios in Infinite Worlds aren't all that common. For example, they're outnumbered by scenarios in which alchemy works (due to alternate physics), the South won the Civil War, Rome never fell, and even where the Abbasid Caliphate is the dominant world power.
- Played with in the Freedom City setting for Mutants and Masterminds. In the unaltered timeline, the Nazi's won WWII, and proceeded to conquer the world. Later, Dr. Tommorow, defected from the Nazi's, stole a prototype time machine, and went back and altered history so that the Allies won.
- Well, not really... Erde still exists, a parallel universe where the Nazis are still the ruling power. Whether the regular universe always existed (with a Dr. Tomorrow character having always appeared at that time period), a universe already existed which Dr. Tomorrow further altered, or the regular Freedom City universe came into being when Dr. Tomorrow stepped into it is left unexplained.
- This can be played straight or inverted in the Time Travel card game Chrononauts. There are four potential ways in which 1945 can unfold. The standard timeline, at the beginning of the game, is as history happens (dropping of atomic bombs, Hitler commits suicide in his bunker). To play this trope straight, all that you have to do is avert Pearl Harbor (playing America Wins The War extremely straight). On the flip side, if you avert Pearl Harbor and assassinate Hitler, war never happens in the first place (the fourth variant, US Invades Tokyo, doesn't go into detail about Hitler's fate).
Video Games
- In Command And Conquer: Red Alert, Einstein creates a time machine so he can kill Hitler, but returns to find that World War II still happened, except this time it was the USSR that invaded Europe.
- It is referred to as the Great World War II in the manual and is said to have been many times more destructive than our World War II.
- Deliberately done in the "cinematic" video game Rocket Ranger.
- The videogame Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich. Slight variation in that it wasn't due to any accidental meddling, but a successful attempt of a supervillain to go back in time and provide Nazi Germany with the superpower endowing Energy X, leaving the heroes to set things right.
- Inverted in City Of Heroes where a modern-day time-traveling Nazi sect known as the 5th Column are more or less removed and replaced in history by a non-Nazi splinter group called The Council in a sort of temporal coup. Word is they're hiding outside of time, however.
- There used to be an alternate dimension accessible through Portal Corp called Axis America. However, at the same time as the Council takeover, that dimension got replaced with the "Council Empire." Again, however, Reichsman, that dimension's Evil Counterpart for Statesman, is imprisoned underneath Boomtown, and there have been hints...
- And combining "Rome Never Fell" with this trope, a certain story-arc involves time-traveling Nazis helping out evil Romans...
- The adventure game Time Gentlemen Please has this as the central plot. Of course, Hitler has an army of dinosaur clones. And it all started with a simple attempt to watch Magnum PI.
Web Comics
- This Subnormality strip.
- Subverted in a couple of other strips, with a pair of neo-Nazi time travelers attempting to intentionally invoke this trope (with little success).
- Mentioned in this Irregular Webcomic strip, which of course references this very page.
- And inverts the "traveling to the future doesn't result in a Nazi victory" condition, too!
- In The Adventures of John and Dave, Dave travels four weeks back in time, causing Nazis to win World War II.
- Inverted in a guest comic of The Adventures Of Doctor Mc Ninja, where Doc kills Hitler only to find 100-meter-tall Jews terrorizing the city. Then everyone went so he's saying Hitler was right argh argh rawr, and the comic was taken down.
Western Animation
- Deliberately done in the first season finale of the Justice League animated series, where the immortal villain Vandal Savage sends information, including how the rest of the war was supposed to play out and plans for technology that wouldn't have been developed for another couple decades, to his past self in order to help the Germans win.
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