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Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act
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"…time travel and Hitlers are always a bad combination."
If you were given the power to travel through time and Set Right What Once Went Wrong, what would you do to prevent the atrocities of the past? Well, for many, the answer is obvious: kill Adolf Hitler. This would prevent World War II, the Holocaust, and their myriad side-effects... right?
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. Trying to kill Hitler just plain doesn't work.
First of all, it's almost impossible to kill the man in the first place. Second, even if you do manage to kill him, the universe will often "undo" it somehow. Third, even if you do take down Hitler, something even worse will appear in his place; an even smarter and crueler leader that wins the war for the Axis, or an individual killed in battle who grows up to terrorize the world. If someone actually does stop Hitler, they'll almost always have to " undo" it to prevent this. And fourth, if everything turned out all right... that'd be boring.
It appears a cosmic law that something bad has to go down in the period between 1930 and 1946-47. Perhaps it's how World War II defined the 20th century; the technological advances, the political foundations, and the example of man's inhumanity to man at its absolute worst that changed whole societies' perception of evil is ever present with us today. To imagine a world without it is to change everything.
Considering the millions of lives lost in WWII, it does make some sense that the world would be a very different place if Hitler had never risen to power. For example, Stalin really wanted to invade the USA, but the Soviet army was so severely weakened after the war that he couldn't. If The War had never happened, Stalin might have been able to make this dream come true.
Note that this does not apply to aliens/demons or evil time travelers who are allied with Hitler; time travelers should feel free to stop them. Other than that, Time Travel is as useless for solving problems as Reed Richards, if it doesn't in fact do the opposite and create a spiraling Butterfly Of Doom effect as part of a Fantastic Aesop.
Of course, it doesn't seem to dawn on anyone to, say, kill Gavrilo Princip, the guy who shot Archduke Ferdinand and started the First World War, instead -- though even there, Pratchett's axiom applies; the tangled web of Great Power alliances and colonial hostilities that laid the groundwork for the Great War was so delicate that it would almost certainly have been triggered by something in that time period, whether the Archduke had survived or not. (In fact, it very nearly blew up several times before that point, although none of them are well remembered.) It might be much easier and more efficient just to go all the way back to the 19th century and kill Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor who unified Germany and started building that house-of-cards treaty network in the first place... but everyone is just so short-sighted they want to kill Hitler. Stop it: all it's doing is making him feel smug!
A subtrope of Nice Job Breaking It Hero.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- In the new Twilight Zone, an agent comes back in time and kills an infant Adolf Hitler. In order not to be punished, his maid kidnaps a beggar's baby and it is raised as Hitler, becoming the one we know.
- In the original Twilight Zone episode "No Time Like the Past", a time-traveler attempts to snipe Hitler during a speech from a hotel window. He is forced to abandon the attempt when the maid calls the police on him.
- Brought up numerous times in Doctor Who, especially the Expanded Universe. In one of the novels, the Doctor helps Hitler to prevent other aliens from making things worse. Another criticised the whole "kill Hitler before the War" theory as a hypocritical exercise in futility, since the only person who would ultimately be able to kill Hitler before he'd actually done anything to merit death (especially as a baby) would be someone who could willingly murder an innocent (a.k.a another Hitler).
- In one rather heavy-handed episode of Sliders, it was discovered that a world in which California was essentially a Nazi state, complete with the ethnic cleansing of minorities, had never had a Hitler (as per one character's befuddled reaction when Hitler's name is dropped), and had therefore never "learned its lesson" re: the horrors of racial oppression and genocide.
- In another Twilight Zone episode, the central character somehow takes over the body of a young Hitler. After tormenting him for a while, the protagonist prepares to force Hitler to commit suicide. However, Hitler reasserts control just before throwing himself into the river. In shock over the whole experience, he wonders why the protagonist, who had identified himself as Jewish, did these horrible things to him. In a combination with the Butterfly Of Doom, the protagonist realizes that he had possessed Hitler before he had acquired any anti-Semitic feelings, and his possession caused those feelings. His attempt to prevent the Holocaust directly caused it.
- Similarly, the Kennedy Assassination appears to be one of these points that genre insists is vital to the Timey Wimey Ball. Every time-travel story that attempts to prevent this ends up with the time-travellers themselves becoming the second gunman on the grassy knoll (in Red Dwarf, it is Kennedy himself, brought back from the disastrous future created by his survival, who makes the fatal shot!).
Anime
- Mikuru from The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya explains this with some obscure Technobabble about "separate timelines".
- The fact that they cannot travel back beyond three years prior to the setting of the series is probably a greater hindrance.
Comic Books
- In Justice League, the immortal Vandal Savage sent a laptop containing current technology to himself, allowing him to depose Hitler, creating a present in which Savage rules the world under the Nazi banner. However, after the good guys beat him, Hitler was dethawed from cryogenic suspension, putting WWII back on track.
- In an X-Men comic, someone makes the mistake of mentioning this idea to Magneto -- who is a Holocaust survivor. Predictably, he explodes.
- This troper wouldn't have predicted an explosion...
- In a Fantastic Four comic book from the John Byrne era, the Invisible Woman, the Torch and She-Hulk find themselves in 1930s New York with Nick Fury. Fury decides to go to Germany and kill Hitler, and the other three try to stop him. They find Fury being interrogated by some goons while Hitler watches; they overpower the goons and free Fury, and Sue Storm gives an impassioned speech about not altering the timeline. Fury nods, starts walking out the door -- and then turns and shoots Hitler. It turns out that it was All Just A Dream.
- In a recent storyline, where a future Dr. Doom comes back to kill Reed, it is actually stated that timelines tend to correct themselves- for example, if you prevent Lincon's assasination, people remember the time he was almost killed in the theatre- a couple of days before being killed in a bathtub slip.
- In the first story arc of Midnighter's solo series, he is sent back in time to kill Hitler in the trenches of World War One, only to be stopped by the Time Police. (Yeah, Garth Ennis isn't known for his subtlety.)
Film
- In the obscure Czech comedy by Jindrich Polák, Tomorrow I'll Be Scalding Myself With Tea, Nazi sympathizers in the '70s get hold of an atomic bomb and a time machine, and decide to return to the '40s to help their hero Hitler win the war.
Literature
- Exception: In Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality novels, the mortal filling the role of Satan tricked the current Anthropomorphic Personification of Time into stopping the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust, in order to repay a debt he felt he owed to the Gypsies. There's no indication that something bad comes of this.
- In a book this editor read several years ago, a fictional "documentational" book for time travelers, a scenario is mentioned where someone assassinates Hitler while he is still a young artist. The assassin never returns -- in this version of Time Travel, dramatically altering history creates a parallel universe, and he returned to his present day in that universe instead of "ours".
- In Stephen Fry's 1997 novel Making History, Hitler's parents are prevented from conceiving, but his absence allows the taller, more handsome, cleverer Rudolf Gloder to ride the tide of frustration that gave birth to the Nazi party, and the results of his reign are worse for the world than Hitler's.
- This example is even more impressive when you consider that the entirety of Fry's mother's family (aside from her parents) were killed in Auschwitz. On top of that, Fry is also gay.
- In the alternate history novels of Harry Turtledove, WWII never goes down in Germany, but a fourth war between the United States and the Confederacy (after the original, another in the 1880's, and the WW 1 analog) occurs in the same time period. There is a WWII in Europe, but it's the CSA, Britain, and France that are fascist, the USA-allied Germany having won World War One and thus still ruled by the Kaiser.
- In the Animorphs book "Elfangor's Secret", the team debates killing an Alternate Universe Hitler (who, in the timeline, is just a low-ranking driver for a Nazi officer) -- then Tobias "accidently" kills him moments later.
- It was an accident. Cassie was trying to dissuade him from doing it, but a German officer shot him and the arm and it jerked out by reflex.
- In Alastair Reynolds' novel Century Rain, WWII is, in fact averted (although not by killing Hitler, he lives till old age) but the result is a negative one, as it effectively halts the progress of science and technology at pre-1940s levels.
- Averted in Lawrence Watt-Evans' short story The Murderer, in which a time-traveling history professor kills Hitler, William Randolph Hearst, Goering, Goebbels, Lenin, Stalin, Rasputin, Mao, Ted Bundy, etc... until the world is a beautiful place. The cops who catch him after the Bundy incident note that if his story's true, HE will go down as one of the most terrible mass-murderers of the 20th century for killing 12 people.
- This editor recalls reading a short story about a time-traveller sent from the future to kill Hitler, who instead decides to prevent an obscure scientist from securing a patent for a steam-powered car... because if that steam-powered car is developed, then Hitler or not, the future he comes will be much worse than the one we live in.
- A passing mention of this is made in Robert A Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The plot involves an agency that can travel through time and across parallel universes. One of their early attempts at improving the world involved assassinating (humanely, they simply ensured that his parents were using birth control on the day of his conception) a Hitler-like dictator. His brutal reign doesn't happen, but what was originally a small-scale nuclear war turned into a global one, since the Hitler-analogue had kept the alternate America out of the war. They rid the world of the evil dictatorship, sure, but they also rid it of all life other than cockroaches. Unusually for this trope, they didn't take their failure as a sign that there are things they shouldn't be messing with; instead, they decided they needed better projections about what would happen should they make a change.
- Alfred Bester's short story "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" also displays a similar paradox. The story involves a professor burning with rage over his wife's affair, who decides to eliminate the other man. He does this by first killing the man's father before he was born, to no effect, he then goes and kills his grandfather. Again nothing. Soon, he's gone on a killing spree against may key figures in history, all in the hopes that one of them would end the existence of his wife's lover. He discovers that no matter how much he changes history, it all continues to make no change in the present.
- The short story "Wikihistory
 " by Desmond Warzel has a funny take on the concept.
- Then there's The Iron Dream -- supposedly a novel Hitler wrote in an Alternate History world where he emigrated to the US after World War I to become a Sci-Fi/fantasy author. In this world, the Soviet Union conquers all of Eurasia and Africa. This makes even less sense if you consider that author Norman Spinrad is Jewish and a liberal.
- However, The Iron Dream's book-within-a-book The Lord of the Swastika is actually about how little it takes for a cliched sci-fantasy novel to seem fascist.
- In the novel Days of Cain by J. R. Dunn, the Moiety is an history-monitoring agency run by mysterious hyper-evolved humans from the end of time, whose directive is that history must remain absolutely untouched so they can study it (in this sense, it's the opposite of the agency in Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity, who constantly tinker with history in order to improve it). The novel centers around a search for rogue agents who are trying to stop the Holocaust (which must be preserved to maintain historical integrity). Interestingly, it's revealed that the other customary linch-pin of history, the John F. Kennedy assassination (as well as the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne) were the Moiety's attempt to stop the Kennedys' rise to power (which was not supposed to happen and was the doing of another rogue agent).
- Averted in .. some story or other. The time-traveler sent to kill Hitler instead uses his expenses budget to arrange a "scholarship" to art school, depriving young Adolf of one of his formative disappointments.
Video Games
- In the Real Time Strategy game Command And Conquer: Red Alert and its sequel, Einstein invents a Time Machine to go back in time and kill Hitler just after he is released from prison, having served his sentence for his role in the Beerhall Putsch. He succeeds in preventing the original WWII, but with the power-vacuum Stalin is left to exercise his lunacy unchecked, leading to a similar, much larger conflict (with even weirder weapons).
- After the Soviets are defeated there is the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Tiberium wars and the Firestorm Crisis, all of which were very bloody, with the 3rd Tiberium War having more casualties than the 1st World War.
- In The Real Time Strategy game War Front: Turning Point, Hitler is assassinated very early in WWII. This, however, makes things worse: under the even more effective leadership of his successor, the Nazis are able to occupy Great Britain. And when they are eventually defeated, things go haywire: Russians take Germany's fall as the chance to advance into Western Europe, triggering a new conflict with the Allies.
- Marginally relevant example: As a counterpoint to the last example, in Kronolog: The Nazi Paradox, the aim is to travel to the past and sabotage the Nazi atomic program, thus changing history so that Germany loses the war.
- Also marginally relevant: In the early flight combat sim Corncob 3D, Hitler was apparently killed by a thrown bottle earlier in his life. In place of WWII, however, there was an alien invasion. Somewhat inexplicably, F 4 U Corsairs are still developed and flown against the alien threat.
- The video game Resistance: Fall of Man kills Hitler the only way you really could: by negating the events that created a desire for a Hitler. In the Alternate Universe of Resistance, the Bolshevik revolution was not successful, so America never got involved in WWI and never bailed out Britain and France after the devastation caused by Germany. Because of this, Germany, Britain, and France work together to rebuild Europe, placing Germany in a good economic position, rather than the piss-poor condition they were in in our universe. Without a desire for a Nazi party to straighten everything out, Germany is peaceful. ...well, until the aliens invade.
- Even if the Russian Empire never fell due to an unsuccessful Bolshevik Revolution, the staggering amount of socio-economic problems Russia was undergoing at that time would still have mandated a pull-out from WWI. Not to mention that the reasons for the USA's eventual entry--namely unrestricted submarine warfare on US merchant ships and the Zimmerman Telegram--were completely unrelated to the success or failure of the Bolshevik Revolution. Looks like a clear-cut case of Did Not Do The Research.
- The Myst rip-off/Titanic cash-in Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time completely and totally averted this. The player character starts the game by being killed in the Blitz, and through various contrived means, it's possible to prevent not just World War II, but also World War One and the Bolshevik Revolution.
- Averted in the text adventure Jigsaw, in which you don't shoot Hitler... but you do shoot Archduke Ferdinand and start World War I. The entire game involves making sure History happens the way it was "supposed to," even if that means doing fairly repellent things.
- Hearts of Iron II lets you (if you're very lucky) instigate a coup in Germany that replaces Those Wacky Nazis with someone more liberal. And although the atrocities of the war are (wisely) glossed over in game, it can be assumed that taking the war down an ahistorical route might prevent the worst of them:
- The classic, invade Germany as Britain and France in 1939 while the Wehrmacht is tied up in Poland.
- For more advanced players, invade Germany as Britain, France and Poland before the historic outbreak of war.
- There exists at least one player who's managed to successfully invade Germany as Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1937.
Tabletop Games
- In the Champions module "Wings of the Valkyrie," the heroes must go back in time to save Hitler after another time traveller kills him before the Nazi Party rises to power... creating an Alternate History where things came out even worse (Germany went communist; the West lost the alternate version of World War Two to the German-Soviet alliance; a falling-out between the victors led to World War Three; several cities have been nuked and the major powers don't seem at all afraid of doing it again when the next war breaks out; the United States is sliding into homegrown fascism). Most people in the alternate 1987 have a general sense that civilization is inevitably going down the drain. It caused some complaints from less Genre Savvy readers who had trouble with the premise that offing Hitler might actually make the world worse.
- Chrononauts, a card game that dealt with time travel and the paradoxes of tinkering with it. This is notable, because a ton of cards kill Hitler off or brought him back. It happens so often you have to wonder if that wasn't planned from the outset.
- In GURPS Time Travel, it is said that many new recruits to the Time Patrol ask this question: they are given more or less the same answers detailed at the top of this article.
Web Comics
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