Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act
|
redirected from Main.HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct
"…time travel and Hitlers are always a bad combination."
"Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?"
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 (trying to track down an obscure Austrian failed painter before he's risen to power usually proves futile, trying to get through his security after he's risen to power usually proves impossible, and trying to get close enough to commit assassination and get away undetectably during his rise to power... well, you get the point). 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 who ''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.
It appears to be 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, maybe Stalin really wanted to invade the USA, but the Soviet army was so severely weakened after the war that he couldn't. In that case, if The War had never happened, Stalin might have been able to make this dream come true (or, more extremely maybe the White Russians could have rejoined and beaten the communists back and re-established the Tsardom, establishing Michael Alexandrovich... *rambling continues*). Or maybe nuclear weapons would have been invented in peacetime, and without the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to terrify the world, some naive world leaders would have started a nuclear war without understanding its true destructive potential. There's no telling if a world without WWII would have turned out better or worse than the world we live in today. And the simple act of killing Hitler may have widely different effects on history depending on the precise time and manner of his death.
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 that might well have been only a stopgap; 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!
In a broader sense, this trope can apply to any historical event so significant or critical that attempting to tamper with it via time travel of any kind, even for noble goals, generally either causes more trouble than it's worth or is foredoomed to have no effect.
Conversely, however, Godwins Law Of Time Travel tells us that it's exceedingly easy for time travellers to make the Nazis' history of conquest worse than it already was in our Real Life timeline. If you're a time traveller, and your story involves the Nazi Germany regime in any way, be prepared to suffer from the angst that comes from a bad case of Nice Job Breaking It Hero.
Examples
Anime
- Mikuru from Suzumiya Haruhi 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.
- Strike Witches Handwaves that with most of Europe still in the safe hands of monarchs and emperors with more Monarchist agendas than Fascist or Communist ideas. Thus no Nazis, however the Neuroi are still a pain in the neck.
Comic Books
- In an X-Men comic, someone makes the mistake of mentioning this idea to Magneto — who is a Holocaust survivor. Predictably, he explodes. In the movie it was the anxiety of separation from his mother in the camps that first revealed the powers of the Master of Magnetism. Without such violent circumstances, Magneto would be a very different person.
- 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.)
- Later, in the same story, Midnighter manages another go at things but... a bit late in the game. He decides to go for it anyway and it turns out Hitler is so messed up in the head that it spooks our hero. The guy basically runs away from the crazy.
- In one classic Strontium Dog prog, Johnny Alpha and Wulf travel back in time to arrest Hitler and put him on trial before the Court of Ultimate Retribution. They have to pick him up moments before his suicide however, otherwise there would be nothing to try him for.
- The appropriately named graphic novel I Killed Adolf Hitler both subverts and invokes this trope as the center to its entire plot. A down-on-his-luck hitman is hired to go back in time and kill Adolf, using a time machine that is only good for one round trip. Only he bungles the job, and Hitler steals the time machine and escapes to the present. With no way back home, he's forced to live through the intervening years the normal way, waiting for the day the time machine arrives so he can stop Hitler.
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.
- In the film, Valkyrie, about the actual July 20th, 1944 attempt to kill Hitler, Claus von Stauffenberg points out that simply killing Hitler is not enough. For instance, Hitler's immediate subordinate, Heinrich Himmler (A real sick puppy himself), commander of the Gestapo and the SS, would retaliate against the plotters or even worse, seize power for himself and Germany would be right back where it started.
- If you imagine how many actual attempts at killing Hitler existed and ALL of them failed... you somehow start to believe into this theory mentioned here. Maybe not all of them were born in that time? However, it is really ridiculous to see how many attempts Hitler survived, he HAD to have a deal with... someone. Anyone.
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 Jewish God (not to be confused with the current God). There's no indication that something bad comes of this. Much of this is because Satan, while a bastard, isn't completely evil. He'd rather like to be good, but knows not only his place, but has a professional pride in his work. YHWH helped him in a way that spoke deeply to him, awakening much of the good in him. His work in preventing Hitler's rise is mainly by taunting the heroes in his 'victory' using their petty spite against him to defeat Hitler.
- In 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.
- Bizarrely, the only significant impact a Nazi-controlled Europe has on the United States is that homosexuality is outlawed.
- It does appear a more generally illiberal place, a 1990s US socially stuck in the 1950s. Overt racism, for example, seems to be the norm.
- 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. Not to mention Jake Featherston's Nazi parallel 'Freedom Party', complete with genocide against Confederate blacks.
- In this alternate, we meet Hitler, an obsure Sergeant in the German Army, still seething with hate but insignificant.
- 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 "accidentally" kills him moments later. Other than that incident, the trope plays out.. interestingly. Washington is killed crossing the Delaware, and the States remain British colonies. HMS Victory gets taken out by a time traveler at Trafalgar, and Napoleon's fleet wins. Einstein never leaves Germany for America.. but D-Day still happens - except that it's a (likely entirely) British force against a German-French alliance. Oh, and Hitler was an old guy in a jeep, and there apparently were no Nazis. (But the future ends up even worse.) By the end, nobody knows what the hell's going on, so it's just as good that they manage to stop the villain from going back in time at all. Or being born, for good measure. Which is particularly chilling, since the villain technically survives. They just stop the birth of the host. Of course, this makes me wonder why it doesn't just happen anyway, with a different person.
- The Yeerk had no knowledge of Earth's political history; that was provided by the host. Without detailed historical information, even the Time Matrix would have been useless for anything but brute-force genocide.
- The host had no exceptional knowledge of Earth's political history either, he was just an unsuccessful actor. Any knowledge he could have provided could have come from any human or, for that matter, a quick Google search. By erasing him, the heroes prevent Visser Four from finding the Time Matrix in the first place, though why this discovery was so tied to this host isn't explained. There are hints of a discarded subplot exploring this discovery (Ax mentions fact he couldn't possibly know, suggesting he learned them from Visser Four, though they hadn't spoken), but that's another trope.
- 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. 'course, it happens in a separate world, not our world, created as some kind of museum to protect human past. And IIRC, technology may have been artificially halted to prevent rockets from banging on the roof.. Effective. Most great leaps in technology pre-Internet was done in, or for, war.
- 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. As pointed out in the lead-in, however, he failed to take into account the political framework and ethnic tensions. More likely than the ending to that story, the same events simply happened as usual but with different players.
- 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.
- 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).
- In The Never War, the third book in the Pendragon books by D.J. Mac Hale, Bobby and Spader come to First Earth, which is in the late 1930s. They think their mission is to stop the Hindenburg from exploding. Bobby ends up in Third Earth, a good three thousand years from our time, and a super-advanced computer is used to figure out that the world will be much worse if it doesn't happen because Hitler will win WWII by having the atom bomb first. Long story short, they let the Hindenburg blow up for the good of mankind.
- Orson Scott Card's book Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus is probably the epitome of averting this trope... and contains an implication that the depicted act of changing the past happened twice. What convinces the heroes in Pastwatch to go back and alter history (keeping Europeans out of the new world while helping the Mesoamericans make technological and cultural progress so the two hemispheres meet on an even, non-genocidal footing) is evidence that their own timeline is the result of a previous intervention (Columbus originally led a horrific crusade against the Muslim world that crippled Europe and left it easy pickings for a later invasion by advanced Aztecs).
- The Dragonlance "Twins" novels utilises this trope and then breaks it. Time travel is achievable by powerful spells, but it isn't possible for humans, elves, or dwarves to prevent the Cataclysm or otherwise affect events in a material way because these races were part of existence from the beginning and can't affect its' flow. The metaphor is that time flows as a fast-running river: if you throw a pebble into the river, you may cause a few ripples, but those ripples will be washed away in the overall flow of the stream (cf: the Butterfly Of Doom on this point.) However: if a kender travels through time, it is possible to alter the past. With the result that kender are forbidden to travel in time, oddly.
- "Oddly?" The Kender are an entire race of the Spanner In The Works. Chaos incarnate. It's unspeakably dangerous to allow a Kender access to a shiny rock, let alone time travel.
- It isn't limited to Kender being able to change time, though. Several "artificial" species/races can have the same effect. In a latter novel Draconians are penciled in.
- "Wikihistory"
 by Desmond Warzel. That is all.
- James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation inverts this. In the original timeline, there is no World War II, the world develops peacefully all the way up to the 21st century. A small group of ultra-wealthy control freaks don't like this and build a time machine which they use to go back and create Hitler. The efforts of the protagonists from the changed timeline to deal with the consequences wind up creating the world we live in now. Hogan's short story "The Pacifist" is a pure expression of this trope. Guy goes back in time to assassinate Hitler, and succeeds, only to discover that Hitler was a nice guy, an effective and popular leader. Pity the same couldn't be said for the double who replaced him after he was killed...
- In the two-part alternate history novels Fox At The Front and Fox On the Rhine, Operation Valkyrie actually ends up working all because of a sneeze. Hitler dies, and guess what happens? The above described situation with Himmler takes place almost exactly as described. Though, things do end up seemingly better than in real life, as everyone's favorite Magnificent Bastard ends up being The Hero, and Himmler ends up dieing in a much worse way than Hitler. Oh yeah, and we get to throw our first nuke at at the Soviets instead of Japan.
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).
- Though not about Schicklgruber per se: In one recent episode, The Doctor, when asked why he can't warn the people of Pompeii that they're all about to be killed in a volcanic explosion gives the Timey Wimey Ball excuse of some events being a "fixed point in time" — i.e., they cannot, dare not be changed. One can only assume that's a reason that The Doctor hasn't gotten around to stopping World War Two. That, and when Donna tries to warn the city of their fate, they laugh her off.
- Did Not Do The Research here: in Real Life, the Pompeiians were perfectly aware of what was going to happen (volcanoes are obvious, and Vesuvius had been misbehaving for decades), it's that their attitude to disaster management was lacking.
- You also need to consider that if the Doctor did in fact get everyone out of Pompei before the Volcano erupted, he'd have changed history so that he would never know they were in danger since it would seem someone had saved them, and thus because he would do nothing about it since he wouldn't know it was him who saved them all, they'd end up dying, and then they wouldn't, and then the would...
- Considering giant flying monster things started eating everyone last time they changed the past, the fact that he didn't warn Pompeii seems to be justified...
- I cannot believe that no-one's mentioned Genesis of the Daleks yet. Considering that the Daleks have always been used as a metaphor for the Nazis, this following exchange is about as close to this trope as we're going to get:
The Doctor: Just touch these two strands together and the Daleks are finished... Have I that right?
Sarah-Jane: To destroy the Daleks? You can’t doubt it.
The Doctor: But I do! You see, some things could be better with the Daleks. Many future worlds will become allies just because of their fear of the Daleks... But the final responsibility is mine, and mine alone. Listen: if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you, and told you that the child would grow up to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?
Sarah-Jane: We’re talking about the Daleks, the most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them! You must complete your mission for the Time Lords.
The Doctor: Do I have the right?
- 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!). This is also lampshaded as Lister tells Kennedy "It'll drive the conspiracy nuts crazy, but they'll never figure it out."
- Star Trek Enterprise. In "Storm Front" Captain Archer is urged by one of the people in the Alternate Universe where Germany is winning WW2 to use his phase cannons to destroy Berlin, but he tells her to be patient and let him correct history his way.
- In the season five premiere of Lost, Pierre Chang explains to a foreman that the unlimited energy source beneath the Orchid greenhouse can be used to manipulate time. The incredulous foreman replies "what, we're gonna go back and kill Hitler?" to which Chang replies "Don't be absurd! There are rules! Rules that can't be broken!"
- To be fair, Lost has shown fairly clearly that time travel can't really accomplish anything, as in this show, it's all already written in stone — or rather that one can make small changes, but the timestream has a way of self-correcting so "major" events still occur anyway.
- Or is it? The show will make its decision one way or the other thanks to Sayid's well aimed shot at 1977's Ben Linus.
- Nope, still written in stone.
- Having said that, the show does indicate the rules sometimes can be broken - Desmond being the object example, since he's apparently able to withstand time-travel-induced-brain-aneurysms more or less by force of will.
- in Red Dwarf series we find that Hitler is actually saved from successful assassination when Lister steals his handbag with bomb during one time travel(when he uses "evolved" film developer). Later they also manage to accidentally save Kennedy but that ends much worse than saving Hitler
Music
- In the song "Parantaja" by Finnish garage metal band Riivaaja, a man of Jewish descent devises a time machine, travels to the past and assassinates Hitler. He returns to his own time to see the Soviets having completely taken over, and figures the only solution left is to go back to the past and assassinate himself.
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.
- It gets especially fun when one player requires Hitler killed off, and another needs him alive to win...five paradoxes being created/rectified each turn. And that's before you start factoring in reviving/assassinating people/things like Lincoln, Kennedy, Sputnik, the Titanic...
- 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.
- In one In Nomine scenario, a bunch of drunk skinheads use a time-machine to travel back to 33 AD to try and prevent Jesus' crucifixion. The players (either angels or demons) are tasked by their respective Powers That Be to stop them, as it would create a time shitstorm of unparalleled magnitude. Amusingly, the scenario writers provided G Ms with an exit strategy in case the players royally botch their mission (as P Cs are wont to :) ) : the skinheads do free Jesus... only to find his pacifist speeches (and the fact that he actually wants to be crucified - that was Dad's whole plan after all) very grating. Then they find out that he's a Jew and promptly beat him up and drown him (skinheads, remember ?). Thus, the players can still come back to a normal present, the only difference being that the Christian symbol has become a vial of water.
- Played with in Genius: The Transgression. You can kill Hitler, but it won't do anything (except get the Time Cops mad at you.) Hitler has been killed six times over, so the setting's Time Cops started cloning him. If you head back to 1921 Hamburg, you can get a tour of the cloning facility.
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 at the one moment in history where his location in civilian life was absolutely verified, being just outside the gates of Landsberg prison on December 20, 1924, moments after completing 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).
- And then, just to make it even weirder, the Soviets pull an Einstein on Einstein, erasing not only him but the nuclear technology he invented. Of course, this doesn't have an apparent affect on either Japanese nanotechnology or the Soviet's own Tesla technology.
- Or, apparently, on the capability of nations to create bombs with "megaton" yields (a term specifically used, at least in reality, for nuclear weapons), as the Soviets attempt on one of the levels of at least the Allied campaign of the game.
- 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. However, the Nazi's getting the bomb in the first place was a result of a time traveller.
- 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, F4U 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.
- ...until the aliens invade and wipe out most of Europe and Asia. And North America too by the end of the second game. So I'd say this still counts as an example.
- 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.
- The game was released a year before the movie, so it's hardly a cash-in.
- 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.
- If Hitler holds another position in the German cabinet, you can also just shoot him. Also, the German player may get events to remove him.
- Why not just MOVE THAT DANG TABLE? Alternatively, take the place of the carpenter and construct it of something less sturdy.
- One City Of Heroes arc inverts the general scenario: A Nazi is sent to the future (our present) to learn everything he can about what the Allied plans were in order to help Hitler win World War II, only to be thwarted, in part, by Requiem, the leader of the Nazi enemy group, who wishes to Take Over The World himself and thus had to deny Hitler his victory.
Web Comics
Flash
- "Time Travel Travesty" inverted the trope, in that the time-traveller WANTED something bad to happen. An evil genius comes up with an Evil Plan, go back in time to kill Hitler causing the Soviet Union to take over Europe. His henchman called him out on it, stating he's just copying the plot of Command And Conquer: Red Alert. Unlike Red Alert though, the universe just explodes.
Western Animation
- Spoofed in an episode of Robot Chicken that featured a recurring segment entitled "Dicks with Time Machines." Throughout the episode, the same character changed history for the worse except in the last segment, where he caused World War II to end early by making Hitler severely publicly humiliated. As he's giving one of his rallying speeches, somebody puts a video of him suffering diarrhea in his background. Nazis no longer take him seriously, the war ends! (which causes the title of the last segment to be changed to "Heroes with Time Machines")
- Spoofed in Family Guy where Stewie and Brian go back in time to save Mort Goldman, who accidentally ends up going back in time to the German invasion of Poland. Upon returning, Brian asks if Mort, a Jew might end up going back in time to stop Hitler, to which Stewie responds that they've returned 30-seconds before Mort initially goes goes back in time. He then pushes Present!Mort back into the time machine and blows it up with a laser.
- 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.
Real Life
- There were at least 42 attempts on Hitler's life. Are you sure none of the would-be assassins were time-travellers? And they all failed, in preposterously inconvenient ways. For instance, an Iron Cross recipient at Nuremberg was going to stab Hitler in front of 1,000 soldiers at assembly; Hitler had a cold that day and decided to go home early. A bomb intended to blow up the Fuherer mid-flight failed to go off because of cold weather; another one did go off, but Hitler had changed his schedule at the last minute. The bomb in Valkyrie blew up everything else in the room. Historians actually joke that Hitler literally had Satan's Luck. (some Christian Fundamentalists claim God kept Hitler alive to ensure the founding of Israel...)
- Of course, countless assassination attempts (at least until one works) is an inevitable occupational hazard of politics in tumultuous times. Queen Elizabeth of England, the last of the Tudors, was equally plagued by those pesky conspiratorial plots to violently remove her from the throne, by time travelers or otherwise.
- If I may digress, there is some evidence that suggests that at least some of these conspiracies were actually orchestrated by agents of the Crown to create solidarity amongst royalists and protestants and to destroy the credibility of non-conformist and recusant groups, chiefly Catholics. Joseph Pearce's The Quest for Shakespeare suggests that the infamous Gunpowder Plot was doomed to fail from the start for this reason - it was instigated by Sir Robert Cecil and his network of spies in order to punish Catholics angry over the 1604 bill which reaffirmed the anti-Catholic statues instituted during Elizabeth's reign. Perhaps some of the plots against Hitler were orchestrated as well?
- Did anybody besides This Troper notice that the number was... 42?
- Given the political climate in Weimar Germany following the First World War, some political group (whether it be far-right wing or far-left wing) would have come around and taken control of Germany and started a Second World War. Not only was Ernst Röhm looking to groom a charismatic leader, but so was Adolph Hitler, who regarded himself a "drummer boy" until others, including Hermann Göring pushed him into the spotlight.
- Whoa there. Yes, it was very likely that some radical group, either left or right, was going to take control of Germany sooner or later. But it's a huge leap to go from that observation to "they would have started WWII anyway." Not every German opposition group was itching for another war; in fact even the Nazis themselves might not have started the war if they had a different leader (as in, they might have decided to take the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia and then stop, rather than go that one step further and invade Poland; they already had an amazingly good deal by any standards in 1939, and starting a war with the Allies would just seem like a hugely unnecessary risk to most sane people at that point).
- How much of history is due to individuals and how much is due to societal drives is a common debate amongst historians. The consensus seems to be... both. Which is to say, individuals, in large groups, drive societal trends which can then be used like a giant lever to move the world. How well that world is moved depends on the individual using it. So killing Hitler probably would have resulted in history turning out differently. How differently is the matter of debate, which probably also depends on when you kill him.
Other
- Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, who do audio dramas in the vein of old fashioned Radio Drama, had a story called The Assassin, where the time traveler trying to halt World War Two goes back in time to assassinate a six year old boy, to prevent the formation of Nazi Germany. The catch? Hitler was the guy who eventually replaced the dictator-to-be that was assassinated by the time traveler.
|
|
