History NoGoodDeedGoesUnpunished / RealLife

* During World War I, a British soldier named Henry Tandey found a 29-year-old wounded German corporal. In an act of battlefield mercy, Tandey decides to spare the German and left him alone. Who was that German Corporal? Why, none other than Adolf Hitler. [[http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-soldier-allegedly-spares-the-life-of-an-injured-adolf-hitler That's right;]] an act of mercy in World War I ''resulted in World War II''. It's worth noting, though, that [[https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-a-British-soldier-chose-not-to-kill-Hitler-in-WWI-Did-he-live-to-see-what-Hitler-became historians have disputed whether this event actually happened,]] since a lot of it hinges on the word of, well, [[UnreliableNarrator Hitler]]. It's entirely possible that Hitler [[ForTheEvulz just wanted to screw with a Victoria-Cross winning soldier, to make one of Britain's heroes look bad]].

* Oskar Schindler is rightly remembered as one of the most prominent members of the Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed by the State of Israel on non-Jews who helped to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Using a mixture of politicking and bribery, Schindler saved the lives of over 1,000 Jews working at his factory. In the process, Schindler exhausted his entire fortune, and his business ventures following the war all ended in failure. In a partial aversion of this trope, however, the Jews he saved never forgot what he did for them, and Schindler managed to survive off of their financial support until his death in 1974.

* Performing well in a government or military job tends to earn you more work, as your superiors realize you can be trusted to accomplish it. Performing poorly, on the other hand, will get your responsibilities gradually taken away, but it's usually much more difficult to fire people than it would be in the private sector. One easily can wind up in the unfortunate situation where the high performers do all the work (and often burn out on it from the stress) and are surrounded by marginal performers who do nothing but continue to receive a paycheck every month. There's a joke in the private sector that the reward for a good job is more work.

* During the Gempei War in Japan, Kiyomori Taira spared the three young sons of Yoshitomo Minamoto. The sons - Yoritomo, Yoshitsune, and Noriyori - grew up into the greatest warriors of the era, leading to the complete extermination of the Taira family after the battle of Dan no Ura 1185. Karma eventually caught Yoshitsune Minamoto. He was an able general and warrior who greatly aided to raise his elder brother Yoritomo into Shogun. As a reward [[UngratefulBastard Yoritomo]] had [[CainAndAbel Yoshitsune and his whole family killed]]. Yoritomo had also his surviving brother Noriyori and his family murdered.

* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Abby_Choi murder of Abby Choi]], dear [[ ExaggeratedTrope almighty fricking lord!]]. Abby Choi was an extremely wealthy model who married a middle class man (who was secretly drowning in debt) at 18 and had 2 kids with him. She lavished him with money and gifts, which he used to live a luxurious lifestyle. The relationship didn't work out and they divorced shortly after. Even after the couple divorced she still continued to financially support him (the ex husband) and his family, going as far to buy a multimillion dollar condo for them to live in. The ex husband and his family eventually ended up brutally murdering her and [[ImAHumanitarian turning her remains into soup]] out of spite when she wanted to sell the multimillion dollar condo she bought for them

* This [[http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/list.htm list of over 700 Poles]] who were executed during the Nazi occupation for helping persecuted Jews, some merely for [[DisproportionateRetribution providing food to starving ghetto inmates]].

* [[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/12/90-year-old-arrested-feeding-homeless_n_6147274.html 90-year-old arrested for feeding the homeless]].

* This happens disconcertingly often in the medical field, whether it be [[MoneyDearBoy for monetary reasons]] or simply because of egos doing the talking.
** The man that discovered that washing hands prevents diseases, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis]], was shunned by the medical community for his discovery up until his death. This was before germ theory was widely accepted -- that is, germs were known to exist, but ''contagion'' was viewed with skepticism -- so Semmelweis did not have the necessary proof to back up his claims at the time. The claim was largely rebutted by saying that the idea that doctors being responsible for the death of their patients was preposterous and unacceptable.
* A man found a toddler lost and missing her parents and went to go help her find them. Some people nearby mistook the man for a kidnapper and informed the parents of said child. No sooner than that happened, the father of the child confronted the man and delivered a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown on him before being pulled away by the police. To rub salt on the wounds, the man ended up getting slandered on social media as he was accused of being a pedophile, forcing him to leave town with his family. As for the father? [[UngratefulBastard He refused to apologize]].

* [[DirtyCop Crooked]],

* Related to the above examples, a person who is a hard worker and

* Website/{{Cracked}}:
** Cracked features an article entitled [[http://www.cracked.com/article_20284_5-horrifying-ways-universe-has-repaid-good-deeds.html 5 Horrifying ways the Universe has repaid good deeds]].
** [[http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-celebrities-who-got-blacklisted-doing-right-thing/ 4 celebrities who got blacklisted for doing the right thing]] written by Cracked.
** [[http://www.cracked.com/article_20815_5-heroic-attempts-to-do-good-that-backfired-horribly.html 5 Heroic Attempts to Do Good That Backfired Horribly]] written by Cracked.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg.]] A Swedish diplomat, who saved a countless number of Jews and other persecuted people from extermination camps, was widely known as a philanthropist-and was arrested just before the end of WWII by the Soviets. The Soviet intention was to extort the Swedish government by keeping him as a hostage and exchange him for Soviet spies caught in Sweden. When Sweden refused to comply, he disappeared into the Gulag.
** Wallenberg's brother was an accomplice of the Nazis, buying the gold they had stolen all over Europe. It's hardly surprising the Soviets thought he was up to no good.

* [[DirtyCop Crooked]], [[PoliceAreUseless lazy cops]] have been known to pin crimes on the people who called them just because they are having a difficult time finding the real criminal. Calling the cops and, as a consequence, being asked to testify in court as a witness can make them a target.[[note]]This is what ''actually'' happened to [[BystanderEffect Kitty Genovese]]. There was no 911 at that time. You had to know the precinct number, or dial 0 and hope the operator would eventually get around to connecting you. Police were likely to put you on hold, hang up on you, or arrest you for "bothering" them with "trivial" incidents like domestic violence or arguments, which is what most neighbors thought was going on. Indeed, that was almost exactly what happened. Kitty's girlfriend was held as a major suspect and repeatedly questioned despite not remotely matching witness descriptions (the perpetrator, Winston Mosley, was a black man), and the fact that she was gay didn't help. Ultimately, Mosley was only caught because he was arrested on an unrelated offense and happened to confess while in custody.[[/note]]
* When it comes to gang violence, many potential witnesses will either not call the cops or refuse to testify in court, fearing that the gang member's allies will hunt them and/or their family/friends down for revenge. Street gangs know about this and some have started to wear shirts with the phrase "Don't Snitch" (or a variation of it) on them to intimidate people into keeping quiet.\\\
Another reason many witnesses don't come forward is that the local police don't protect them most of the time. Many police departments claim witness protection is too expensive, and only use it when they're going after a high-profile criminal, not an average street criminal. So the witness who decides to come forward, does so at their own risk, causing a ViciousCycle of those in crime-ridden areas not trusting officers, keeping mum when a crime occurs, making the officers' attempts to solve the case (and arrest those responsible) much harder, leading to more crimes by the same person(s).
** On that same note, the people living in immigrant communities try to go about their lives while keeping a low profile so as not to attract the attention of the authorities. When a local thug commits a crime, if a witness notifies the local police, they will take the report and the witness will be asked their immigration status. If they don't give a satisfactory answer, or can't provide proof that they are legally allowed to stay in the country, the police will file a report that there's a local thug running around, take in the witness and hand them over to immigration, and be detained until a judge determines whether or not s/he should be deported. Once word of this gets out, everyone else in the community has to either choose to allow the thug to keep striking, or risk getting kicked out of their adopted country. (Even ''legal'' immigrants/residents have had this happen, when police are biased against anyone who appears foreign and assume any documentation they're shown is phony, besides the fact that [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-see-all-immigrants-as-legal-or-illegal-big-mistake/2012/07/13/gJQAKzogiW_story.html today's immigration system in general is crazy]].)
** The same works for anyone who finds themselves a victim of in sex trafficking. Many women have reported those exploiting them to the police, only to find themselves arrested for prostitution. [[note]] This is way some jurisdictions, like the UK, have made prostitution legal, whilst keeping pimping and kerb-crawling illegal. Meaning, in these places, it's legal for somebody to sell sex from their own bodies, but it's illegal to sell sex provided by another person as well as buying sex from prostitutes. [[/note]]

* Whistleblowers. You typically lose your job, can't easily find another with your status, and this is the best-case scenario without legal repercussions or death threats. Supposedly there are laws against retaliation, but given how most companies hire you on an at-will basis, they'll just fire you anyway for some allegedly unrelated reason.
** Chelsea Manning may or may not be an up to eleven example of this trope. In 2010, she revealed corruption and failures within the US government to Wikileaks, technically and judicially committing treason. She did what she felt morally right. As a reward, she got a prison sentence and a dishonourable discharge from the US military. However, in January 2017, as one of his last acts as Commander-in-Chief, President UsefulNotes/BarackObama would commute her sentence, and she was released in May 2017.

* It is illegal in some states to top off parking meters in front of cars that don't belong to you, since it deprives the city of the money from a parking ticket. And in some jurisdictions, e.g. [[http://www.sfmta.com/cms/pmeter/indxpkmeter.htm San Francisco]], it's illegal to top off parking meters in front of cars that ''do'' belong to you. [[note]]This only applies to parking meters in zones with a time limit. i.e., If you've parked there for 30 minutes in a two-hour zone, you can't top off a meter for the full two hours because you can be there for 2.5 hours[[/note]]
* In some cities, advertising a free service giving people a free ride home if they had too much to drink is illegal (considered operating a taxi without a license). This is because being able to get a drunk person into your car to take where you want is a wonderful opportunity for the less-than-generous, but it also causes people to drive when they really shouldn't.
* The fact that Good Samaritan Laws exist in the US is a result of this. There are cases where a person tried to sue the person who performed CPR or the Heimlich Maneuver on them. In some cases this is because the good samaritan may have performed the life-saving technique wrong, injuring the victim even more than they already are, while certain other life-saving procedures result in injuries even when done correctly [[note]]one example being [[CPRCleanPrettyReliable CPR]], which tends to result in broken ribs[[/note]]. Because of events like this, people hesitate to help someone that is in trouble, fearing they will be punished for just trying to help out or hurt the victim even more. To this effect, there has never been a successful court case in the US against someone who was providing emergency aid in good faith. In other jurisdictions - including Germany - this is actually inverted as there are explicitly laws for "Failure to Help" which punish people who could've helped (at no or acceptable risk to themselves) but chose not to.
* A grown man helping a child who is lost [[MistakenForPedophile can get you marked as a sex offender]] and ruin your life. This notion is part of why enrollment of volunteers in Big Brother programs have fallen off in recent years.
** On a similar note, men helping female domestic abuse victims by [[WifeBasherBasher confronting their abusers]] have at times been [[StockholmSyndrome vilified by the women they attempted to help]] when the police arrive, tragically discouraging other men from sticking their neck out to help other victims.
** Adults who fit certain physical and behavioral profiles can be marked by police as potential child killers. They can be placed under surveillance, including ''in their homes,'' and harassed for decades.
* The trope name is frequently quoted by ''Series/JudgeJudy'', in cases where the plaintiff got screwed over by trying to help someone (usually by lending money to a deadbeat).
* Standing up to bullies that are picking on someone at school will likely get the [[ZergRush bullies and their friends to come after you]] for your troubles. This can result in other kids keeping quiet about the bullying incident or refusing to help out in fear that they will become a victim themselves. It gets worse when physical violence is involved. And that's assuming they don't get in trouble with the school, while the bully [[KarmaHoudini invariably gets away with it]].

* Related to the above examples, a person who is a hard worker and overachiever at their department store or supermarket job, will often result in them being called on repeatedly during their days off, to fill in for another work who'd called off their shift. This can especially be brutal if the person only gets one day off during the week, and in most cases, the extra work doesn't lead to much extra money, since most of it gets taken away in taxes out of their paycheck. Even if the employee does see much of the overtime pay in their checking account, it doesn't take back the mental and physical energy they burnt away with the pick-up work, or the time they could've spent recharging their metaphorical batteries. In a similar vein, if your manager posts the schedule for the upcoming weeks and there's an empty slot in the schedule, pointing it out will get you "rewarded" by having to fill in that shift.
* Defense attorneys have been targets of threats, assault, or even murder from clients. It's usually because they did not get the client off the hook or at least get them a light criminal punishment.

* Debatable but there is a [[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45335808 homeless guy who sued a couple]] trying to help him after they raised $400K in a [=GoFundMe=]. The couple [[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/08/31/judge-orders-couple-give-homeless-man-money-gofundme-campaign/1155879002/ lost the case]].
** Still an example, but for the homeless man. The couple got greedy, stole most of the money, and then slandered the man by saying they had to stop giving him the money because he was spending it on drugs. The couple is facing some serious jail time. Thankfully [=GoFundMe=] decided to Avert this trope and gave the man the rest of the raised money from their own pocket.

* This trope is why an increasing number of customer service businesses have policies on employees physically assisting disabled customers. Long story short: employees are often discouraged, if not outright disallowed, from physically touching disabled customers (say, to get them out of a wheelchair into their car), ''even if the disabled person explicitly asks'', because if something goes wrong and the person needing help gets injured in the process, they can potentially sue the person and their company.

* As many a person has experienced, parents or teachers sometimes say something such as "If you tell the truth, you won't be in trouble". Tantalized by that offer, children then come forth and tell the truth... but get punished anyway. A very good way to teach this to children, and of course parents will wonder [[FacePalm why their kids are lying to them, not telling them anything, or are always questioning their words]]. (Read SchoolBullyingIsHarmless with this in mind.)

* [[DirtyCop Crooked]], [[PoliceAreUseless lazy cops]] have been known to pin crimes on the people who called them just because they are having a difficult time finding the real criminal. Calling the cops and, as a consequence, being asked to testify in court as a witness can make them a target.[[note]]This is what ''actually'' happened to [[BystanderEffect Kitty Genovese]]. There was no 911 at that time. You had to know the precinct number, or dial 0 and hope the operator would eventually get around to connecting you. Police were likely to put you on hold, hang up on you, or arrest you for "bothering" them with "trivial" incidents like domestic violence or arguments, which is what most neighbors thought was going on.[[/note]]

* UsefulNotes/AlanTuring not only laid the groundwork for modern computing, but his work with British intelligence was vital to the decoding of Nazi Germany's communications during World War II. It is estimated that Turing's contributions to Allied intelligence shortened the war by as much as two years. How was he rewarded after World War II ended? He was outed as a homosexual and prosecuted under Britain's dated Gross Indecency laws. With his career ruined and having been forced to undergo chemical castration to avoid prison, Turing eventually died from cyanide poisoning in what was ruled a suicide. The UK government wouldn't officially apologize for his treatment until 2009, and he was granted a royal pardon in 2013.

* UsefulNotes/AlanTuring not only laid the groundwork for modern computing, but his work with British intelligence was vital to the decoding of Nazi Germany's communications during World War II. It is estimated that Turing's contributions to Allied intelligence shortened the war by as much as two years. How was he rewarded after World War II ended? He was outed as a homosexual and prosecuted under Britain's dated Gross Indecency laws. With his career ruined and having been forced to undergo chemical castration to avoid prison, Turing eventually died from cyanide poisoning in what was ruled a suicide.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg.]] A Swedish diplomat, who saved a countless number of Jews and other persecuted people from extermination camps, was widely known as a philanthropist-and was arrested just before the end of WWII by the Soviets. The Soviet intention was to extort the Swedish government by keeping him as a hostage and exchange him for Soviet spies caught in Sweden. When Sweden refused to comply, he disappeared into the gulags.

* A Mexican illegal alien while crossing the border stops to help a boy and his mother, victims of a car crash. He gets detained and deported.

* It is illegal (operating a taxi without a license) in some cities to advertise a free service giving people a free ride home if they had too much to drink. This is because being able to get a drunk person into your car to take where you want is a wonderful opportunity for the less-than-generous, but it also causes people to drive when they really shouldn't.

* When Aum Shinrikyo wanted to test their chemical weapons stockpile, in 1994 they sprayed a suburb near the city of Matsumoto. Local man Yushiyuki Kono was one of the first people to call the authorities after his wife fell ill from the gas attack, and she would eventually go into a coma. When the police arrived to conduct an investigation, they saw that Kono had a number of pesticides on his property, and concluded that Kona had somehow synthesized the sarin gas used in the chemical attack. After word got out, the Japanese media labeled him a terrorist, and he got numerous death threats and face serious legal actions. Once Aum Shinrikyo struck in 1995, the ensuing investigation cleared Kono, but the Japanese media never retracted labeling him a terrorist.

** The same works for anyone who finds themselves a victim of in sex trafficking. Many women have reported those exploiting them to the police, only to find themselves arrested for prostitution.

** [[https://katu.com/news/local/man-claims-home-depot-fired-him-after-he-helped-police-prevent-possible-kidnapping a couple of Home Depot employees worked with police to foil what looked like a real kidnapping]] in 2017 (police found it was a domestic dispute, but they couldn't have known that) and one of them, Dillon Reagan, was fired. There have been similar incidents where employees were fired for stopping shoplifters or turning in lost wallets.