Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act - Television Tropes & Idioms

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If you time-travel into the past and then try to kill Hitler, it won't work as intended. It may even backfire.

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.

First of all, it often proves near-impossible to kill the man in the first place — if you try to circumvent his security by targeting him before his rise to power begins, it will usually turn out to be ludicrously difficult simply to find him. (Oddly, no one thinks of killing him while he was in the very dangerous position of messenger during World War I, when military records clearly state when and where he served and no one would have blinked an eye had he gotten shot during a run.) Second, even if you do manage to kill him, 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. And of course worst of all, if you manage to kill Hitler with no backfire, millions will be saved and the second world war will be averted. This will mean that you will have no reason to go back in time and kill Hitler, which means you won't, which means Hitler will live, which means that millions will die in the world war and extermination camps, this means that you will go back in time and kill Hitler...

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...). 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.

A common perspective is that without Nazism to vilify it, racism as an official and pursued policy of government would have persisted into the present day; despite the current debate over gay marriage and a large multiracial population, people tend to forget that many American states had laws against homosexuality and interracial marriage, and California actually began sterilizing asylum populations twenty years before the Germans did.

The technological impact cannot be underestimated either; NASA (and thereby all its related spinoffs

) relied heavily on Nazi-backed rocket research, including use of human subjects, and much of the medical community benefited from similar agreements. Even the research on tornadoes now used to protect the world was based on studies of a Japanese scientist when he learned that his hometown was spared being the second nuclear bombing site due to the weather. The economic slump of the Great Depression was transformed into a period of enhanced American dominance in the world, Japan was transformed from military superpower to economic superpower, and the last vestiges of European colonialism were wiped out. 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, or Kaiser Wilhelm II, who almost died at birth anyway, or kill Metternich and prevent him from orchestrating the European Concert, or kill Napoleon before he can start the wars that led to the Congress of Vienna... but everyone is just so short-sighted they want to kill Hitler.

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. (If the Butterfly Effect applies, it needn't even be a "significant" event; any temporal tampering is bound to have too many ramifications to be worth it.) 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.

Not to be confused with scenarios where Hitler is the time traveller.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

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.
In Ghost Sweeper Mikami, the protagonist (Mikami) explains her assistant (Yokoshima) that even when having the power to time travel, it is useles to change past events. That in case she tryied to change something from story, another similar event would happen. In her example, she is shown killing Hittler only to have the USA turned into the new NAZI Empire.
Dragon Ball Z uses the timelines explanation. Even if you went back in time and killed Hitler, your home timeline, plus an infinite amount of other timelines would remain unchanged.
- This ultimately means they end up killing three Cells. The "first" Cell, who travelled back from a timeline where Trunks disabled the Androids before being killed by Cell for his time capsule, the "present" Cell, who was killed while still a fetus in order to avoid having to deal with Cell all over again, and the "future" Cell from Trunks' Bad Future who tries to fight Trunks only to find that he is far more powerful than he is supposed to be at that time.
In a similar way to this trope, without Hitler however, works Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni where Rika travels back thousands of times only to find out she cannot change the fact someone always snaps out and kills.
In the Devilman story, "Slip in Time", Akira and Ryo end up in Austria in the 1920 to "kill a demon..." A real one, turned into a Count. He has decided to buy a portrait of his wife Sophie, painted by poor painter that has no choice - he prefered to keep it because he loves Sophie. A jewish art dealer makes the arrangement, but the same evening Sophie dies, burnt by her demon husband. Akira and Ryo kill the lord demon and then came back to their time, hoping that history is in good shape after what they done. Then, back in the 20s, the painter is furious after Sophie's death, and places the blame on his dealer: "I hate you, I'll spend my entire life to destroy you and your whole race!" and the art dealer starts to run after him: "Hey, what are you saying? Where are you going like that? Adolf? Adolf Hitler!"

Comic Books

This trope is subverted Marvel's Dark Reign: The List #1: Hawkeye asks the other Avengers "if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, wouldn't you?", to which Bucky Barnes/Captain America answers: "I did." Given the way Marvel's Timey Wimey Ball works, this simply spun off an alternate universe.
The Hitler thing was mentioned in a time travel arc of a Godzilla comic book. However, when the villain used his time machine to put Godzilla into the Titanic iceberg, the Big G's escape not only caused the famous collision, but the use of his nuclear breath warmed up the water, increasing the number of survivors.
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.
- Another X-Men story, the mini-series True Friends, has Kitty Pryde and Rachel Summers accidentally travelling to the late 1930s. Kitty, who is Jewish and learned about the Holocaust from her grandfather, himself a camp survivor, decides to assasinate Hitler and most of his staff, until she is forced to choose between changing history and saving Rachel from the Shadow King.
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 their downtime, The Authority likes to go to alternate universes and kill their Hitlers.
In All-Star Squadron#2, Per Degaton noted that he could not time travel to the date of Pearl Harbor due to "interference" in the time stream. (The same writer, Roy Thomas, also had Rama-Tut experience timestream static. Perhaps the presence of so many people attemptting to time travel to a certain point creates congestion, similar to many people attempt to use the same exit from a road.)
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.
In Gerard Way's comic book The Umbrella Academy, the second series is primarily concerned with going back in time to prevent the past version of Number 5 from preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because in the history where JFK survived , he gave The Monocle nuclear weapons as a thank you for saving the world that eventually ended up in the hands of Hazel and Cha Cha, a couple of psychopaths who used them to destroy the world. For shits and giggles.
In a recent issue of Booster Gold, booster off-handedly asks if this mission is stopping another time travelling Hitler assassin.
Averted/subverted in Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, a Vertigo mini-series that interweaves a number of Moorcock's Eternal Champion arcs. In one, featuring "Seaton Begg, Metatemporal Detective" a time-travelling detective(who's resemblance to the Tom Baker Doctor Who is purely coincidental, no doubt) investigates the murder of Hitler's niece in an alternate universe. He ends up proving Hitler's guilt, resulting in his arrest and execution years before the Nazis can ever rise to power, leaving his political machine in disarray.

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.
In Timecop 2, the protagonist was sent back to prevent Hitler being killed, fails and returns to the future, to a world run by Nazi's, complete with time travel technology.
Inglourious Basterds mentions this as Landa is "interrogating" Utivich and Raine. He mentions that "you need all four to win the war", meaning that they must not only kill Hitler, but also Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda), Herman Goering (Commander of the Luftwaffe), and Martin Bormann (Hitler's personal secretary - controlled access to Hitler). This movie itself is a subversion of the trope, as all four of them are killed.
- However, by the point in the war in which this occurred, it would probably be less important, as many of the key events (Invasion of the Soviet Union, certain technological development paths) have already been decided upon.
Aversion: There's actually a 1951 film titled The Magic Face about an actor that kills Hitler, impersonates him, and sabotages Germany's war efforts. It's likely this trope wasn't in effect then because people in 1951 didn't grasp the concept of how different the world would be without Hitler in the first place.
- Sounds like the inspiration for a book called Raven, in which a British commando team launch Operation Raven, in which they kill Hitler on a train and replace him with a lookalike actor named Archie—who is rescued by the SS before he can carry out a cancellation of Operation Sealion, and proceeds to sabotage Nazi war efforts with questionable decisions.
It's rumored that along with the high budget and lackluster reviews of Star Trek The Motion Picture, one of the last straws that forced Paramount to finally remove Gene Roddenberry from day-to-day production duties on Star Trek was a script he had finished for the proposed sequel: where the Enterprise crew had to go back in time to ensure the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because of the catastrophic changes in the timeline wrought by a meddler who saved his life.
- So Red Dwarf did that story instead, illustrating the futility of attempting to change an attempt to change the past.
Hitler himself is an example of the time travel exemption in the Australien film As Time Goes By:
Mike "But you've got a time machine - you could stop it."
Joe Bogart "Couldn't stop the Holocaust - got rid of Strasser, and this dumb painter named Adolf showed up and did it all exactly the same way. Who'd'a read about it?"

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. JHVH 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.
Philip K Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle' contains an alternate timeline where the USA is divided into Japanese (west), German (east) and free or buffer America (central). A novel, 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' within TMITHC describes a timeline wherin Germany lost the war, causing discussion of how things might have been better if the Nazis had lost... occasionally, other realities intrude as well, notably when a Japanese businessman from the novel crosses into the author's perceived present. Try it.
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. Gloder has negotiated a stop to the war with Germany still in control of most of its conquests, and has reigned in the anti-Semitism to the point that it hasn't inspired total war from his adversaries. 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, World War II 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 World War I analog) occurs in the same time period. There is a World War II 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 obscure Sergeant in the German Army, still seething with hate but insignificant.)
In K.A. Applegate's 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.
- The main problem faced by the Animorphs is that the time traveler they're chasing has over a dozen targets he's after. They stop the first attempt (killing Henry V), but fail to stop the second. Afterward, history is so screwed up that none of their knowledge is useful anymore. They spend the rest of the novel unsure of what to do since history has already diverged so much. For instance, when they end up in an American university to save Einstein, they find out Einstein lives in Switzerland, and of course the problem with finding out who's in charge of Germany. The protagonists note that the villain changing history is also confused, as they automatically follow him whenever he travels to another time. Ergo, when they arrive to save Einstein and he isn't there, its because the villain also thought Eistein would be there. He's effectively screwing up his own plans because he's changing events before they happen before he gets a chance to change the event firsthand.
In Alastair Reynolds' novel Century Rain, World War II 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's 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.
The Iron Dream is a rather unusual example set in an Alternate History where Hitler 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. But this is all background material— Spinrad instead uses Hitler's book-within-the-book The Lord of the Swastika to point out the Unfortunate Implications of Golden Age militaristic SF.
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 lynch-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. MacHale, 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 Tlaxcalans).
The Dragonlance Legends trilogy utilizes 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.
"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.
John Scalzi's short story, "Missives From Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results," gives eight possible scenarios resulting from Hitler being killed on August 13, 1908, in Vienna, Austria, each more unlikely (and more hilarious) than the last.
One of the main characters in Sergey Lukyanenko's novel Dances on the Snow (a part of the Genome trilogy) mentions that simulations were done on what would happen if certain key historical figures were to be eliminated before they did what they did. The result was that no single person, even Hitler or Stalin, are important enough in the grand scheme of things to significantly alter the chain of events that resulted in the world history. It should be noted that no time travel technology exists in the novel, this was purely a simulation.
In Li Harbin's Time Ghost series, killing Hitler has apparently gone wrong so many times that all time travel units have blocks on traveling to any time in which the man was alive, because the consequences are dire and It Got Worse each time people tried to do it. This becomes a plot point when one Time Spy decides to prevent World War One instead, thinking it would change things so that World War Two didn't happen, which via chain reaction would mean that World War Three (which nearly wiped humanity out entirely) wouldn't happen. The resulting clusterfuck takes up the bulk of Time Ghost's main plot as this goes very, very, very wrong.
R. J. Rummell's Never Again novels have as their premise a team of assassins sent back to kill (or, sometimes, bribe) several dozen political figures who they blame for everything that went wrong in the twentieth century. Naturally, Hitler is one of them. The Viennese police are momentarily puzzled at the execution-style murder of an obscure starving artist.
- In a subversion to this trope, the assassinations actually do usher in an era of democracy and peace; however in the first novel the assassins become power crazed and start killing each other and in the second it is revealed that one rogue state was quietly hiding nuclear devices around the world and eventually detonates them, causing billions of deaths.
Another version of the Kennedy assassination being inevitable occurs in the novel Replay, by Ken Grimwood. When Jeff tries to stop the assassination in his first replay, the only thing that changes is the name of the assassin (implying an organization behind the shooting, that was collectively smart enough to have backup shooters in place).
Played with in R.A. Lafferty's Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne, in which a group of time travellers head into the past to thwart Charlemagne... and then, in the changed history, another group travels back to thwart him a different way... and then, in the second changed history, a third group travels back in time to... well, you get the idea. It's implied that the recursion is infinite.

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.
- The same episode averts the whole "doesn't think to go back farther" thing, as the time-traveler also attempted to prevent the sinking of the Lusitania (which would keep America out of World War I). It doesn't work either.
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).
- A Brief Summary of Doctor Who Time Travel Theory:
The Doctor Who universe takes the view that certain points in time are "fixed" while others are "in flux", and Time Lords and other time-aware beings are capable of perceiving the difference. Most points in the timeline are in flux, and if anything changes at any of these points, history will simply work around it . Big enough changes do weaken the timeline, sometimes enough for outside forces to take advantage of the weakness, but any changes at these points will not in themselves cause catastrophic universe failure. But a few points in the timeline are completely fixed; these events must happen, and there is simply no working around it. When the Doctor tries to change things around fixed points, history works straight around him and the events happen anyway. The death of Adelaide Brooke catalyzed human expansion into space, and this was such an important event that it became completely fixed. The Doctor worked against his Time Lord instinct to try and change these events, but his efforts caused her to commit suicide, and the timeline flowed right along around him. In fact, she was so important that when a Dalek(another time-aware species) encountered her as a child, it turned around and left. Fixed events apparently can be changed by people who are already members of the events, as with Donna's experiences in Turn Left; this is ostensibly how alternate universes are possible despite the fixed nature of many events. Beyond even being fixed, some events are time-locked, most notably the Last Great Time War, the greater universe's equivalent of World War II. For unexplained reasons it is not even possible to visit these events, let alone change anything. If one could somehow travel back to a time-locked event, they would see "the whole of time and space raging through [their] head", something that would most likely drive you mad. In our Earth, Hitler's life would be fixed in the timeline, so time travelers would be unable to change anything about it. However, Hitler himself or someone else who is native to the timeline could; this would lead to a separate parallel universe, and so things would continue to appear unchanged in ours. Basically, Hitler's gonna happen and there's nothing we can do about it.
- Doctor Who has always used the Daleks as a metaphor for the Nazis, so the following exchange from Genesis of the Daleks 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.
- This was based on "The Primal Solution", a novella by Eric Norden, referenced by Wikipedia's article on predestination paradoxes of time travel in fiction.
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.
- Yet another New Twilight Zone episode called "Profile in Silver" has a Harvard Professor and relative of the Kennedys from the future come back in time to document the assassination with a hologram video camera. After he saves JFK time balances itself by having Nikita Khrushchev killed instead and almost starting WWIII
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. This is a somewhat odd example, as history had already been massively screwed with, and conceivably Archer could have sterilized all of Earth to no ill effect, as the one event he did need to change would reset everything anyway.
- It must be stated, that Archer (who is a major-league genocidal maniac and dooms an entire planet to death because he "doesn't want to interfere"), isn't really the brightest-written bulb in the pack. sloppy writing. and people wonder why enterprise was cancelled - he's worse than Hitler.
- The Original Series has "City on the Edge of Forever", where saving Edith Keeler from being hit by a car means she's going to lead a successful pacifist movement which not only keeps the US out of the war, but shuts down the Manhattan Project, letting the Axis develop nuclear weapons first. It Got Worse after that.
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!"
Red Dwarf. Hitler is actually saved from successful assassination when Lister steals his suitcase (with a bomb inside) during one time travel (where he uses "evolved" film developer). Later they also manage to accidentally save Kennedy, but that turns out to be much worse than saving Hitler. This is also lampshaded as Lister tells Kennedy "It'll drive the conspiracy nuts crazy, but they'll never figure it out."
- The assassination attempt on Hitler was never supposed to be successful in the original timeline - it was the von Stauffenberg "July plot", which failed in real life (though not, as far as I'm aware, because a time-travelling scouser nicked Hitler's briefcase).
  - The July Plot failed because the briefcase was positioned on the other side of a table leg. Killed a couple of people in the room, Hitler got his trousers burned off. These near-miss assassination attempts happened dozens of times.
In Supernatural Gordon uses this trope to try and justify killing Sam to Dean, asking him if he was able to sit next to a very young, aspiring Hitler, would he shoot him?
Averted in The Sarah Silverman Program when Sarah's dog Quantum Leaps to several different times in the episode, then manages to resolve the main plot of the episode when he leaps back with a newspaper with the headline "Dog Attack Kills Aspiring Austrian Artist". (Complete with picture.) Only one good reason for the headline to be in English though.
In The Drew Carey Show, Drew contemplates time travel, and concludes he couldn't kill Hitler because then there would be no History Channel.

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.
Dan Bern's song "God Said No" has the narrator asking God to send him back in time to kill Hitler (as well as prevent the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Jesus). God refuses (duh), saying that if He did send the narrator back, he wouldn't actually do the things he claims he would, instead getting caught up in other, more self-serving activities.

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.
- It should be noted that the original version submitted by the credited author presented the heroes with an alternate history in which killing Hitler creates a worldwide Utopia; the point of the original version was to present the players with an opportunity to debate morality and present a hard choice about whether to restore the original history. Editorial meddling (and possibly concerns that such a module might be a campaign-ender) resulted in the published version, which greatly embarassed the credited author. The less genre savvy readers included Holocaust survivors and (IIRC) the Anti-Defamation League, who had trouble with the premise that slaughtering 6,000,000+ Jews (and others) might actually make the world better.
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...
- This trope is averted in Chrononauts since, with the exception of starting World War III (which terminates human history after 1962, including the invention of time machines) assassinating Hitler at the Berlin Olympics is the most considerable action a player can take. The antisemitic Nuremberg Laws can be repealed before the Final Solution and WWII can be drastically changed or even averted entirely. And then there's cake.
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 Game Masters 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. In an added twist, the Time Police got there a bit late — there was a Nazi party that led Germany to World War II and the Holocaust, but Hitler wasn't behind the reins first time around...
- There's a very high rate of suicide for timecops who protect the Nazi's.
In the time-travel RPG Continuum, the Thespian's Fraternity is a guild of actors who impersonate people who have been killed who weren't supposed to be. It is rude to ask them how many times they've had to impersonate Hitler; the common reply is "Further information is not available here."

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~~ chrono-erase 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. Gladly, erasing Einstein didn't bring Hitler back.
  - Although Einstein seems to have the exemption too because a whole corporation springs up in his place to supply the Allies with weapons and chrono technology.
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 and America never got involved in WWI. 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. At least before the events of the game...
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 antagonist tries to shoot Gavrilo Princip instead, and gives you a gun to do the job in case he/she misses). 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.
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.
While not actually dealing with Hitler, World Of Warcraft has several quests of this nature, in which the Infinite Dragonflight goes back and attempts to change some historical event. The two that fit here are their attempt to prevent the opening of the portal to Draenor that enabled the Orcish invasion by killing Medivh, and their attempt to kill Arthas during the culling of Stratholme, before he became the Lich King. The Bronze Dragonflight, who govern time, send the players back to enforce their exemptions, explaining that despite the suffering these events caused things would be worse if they had not occurred. In particular with the opening of the Draenic portal they say that without the orcs the world would have been destroyed when the Burning Legion invaded, as they allied with humans and elves to stop them.

Web Comics

Explained in this Subnormality strip.
- Booth is not to be used to kill Hitler
- And clearly parodied here, where the trope is inverted.
Played with in these webcomics on Squidi.net (keep clicking forward).
Parodied by Starslip Crisis here. Maverick of Deep Time used to kill Hitler and then go back in time to stop himself for fun.
Averted (so far) in Jesus Christ: In the Name of the Gun. Jesus, himself, does this, although it was much more difficult than expected.
Used with "communist" China in this this Wonderella strip
The main character of Least I Could Do decides to write an "alternate history" novel. Guess what the plot is?
Irregular Webcomic here (with, of course, a reference to this page).
- Also mentioned here.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Possibility C of the red button hover-over.

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.
Subverted in South Park: in the episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" Cartman directly asks Clyde if he would go back in time and kill Hitler given the chance, then adds that he himself wouldn't, because he thinks Hitler was awesome.
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 one episode of Time Warp Trio, Joe, Samantha and Fred accidentally cause Napoleon to win the Battle of Waterloo. When they return to the present, the U.S. is now "New France" and they are forced to go back in time and fix it.
The Freakazoid episode Freakazoid Is History inverts, Freakazoid ends up traveling back in time and adverts WWII by stopping the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Not only does it go off perfectly, the future is changed for the better (at least as far as Feakazoid is concerned).
Double-subverted in the Futurama episode "The Late Philip J. Fry." The Professor's forward-only time machine catapults him, Fry, and Bender into the future, and to return, they end up having to go forward through the end of the universe and the beginning of a new, identical one. On the first pass, the Professor apparently succeeds in killing Hitler with a blaster, but they then have to go through again, and he misses and hits Eleanor Roosevelt (most likely due to being 10 feet off from their position on the first pass, or possibly because he just slowed down and fired out of the window rather than stopping, exiting the machine, and taking careful aim).
- What's interesting is that the death of Hitler and Roosevelt appears to have had no effect on life in 3010 or the years in between that we see through the window of the time machine.

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.
One recurring joke in John and Hank Green's Brotherhood 2.0 videos is the Evil Baby Orphange, a project suggested by a fan in the midst of a conflict over whether killing Baby Hitler was ethical: instead of killing him, kidnap and bring him to a mountain retreat with other kidnapped historical despots.
There is a 1966 Swedish play, Å, vilken härlig fred!, about war, democracy, and civil rights that touches on this. One scene is in an alternate history where Nazi Germany won WWII and... not very much seems different. A movie poster announces the latest 007 film — 007 Gert Fröbe, that is — and the latest teenage fad is rück und rüll music, but otherwise the actors read the actual newspaper of the day and discuss current events that the audience would be familiar with. But: when one of the actors complain about Hitler getting the Nobel Prize ("a fat geezer who spends his time at the Riviera wrapped in a blanket making bad paintings") a member of the audience leaves to come back later with some uniformed policemen who drag the actor off stage.
This time machine tale takes a moment from stealing cereal through time and creating paradoxes to explain why it won't work.