Killing Hitler

Imagine that you have either invented or come into the possession of a time machine. What is the first thing you do? If you said ‘kill Hitler’, then congratulations, you are a character in a cliché science-fiction story. I can hardly blame you for saying that. After all, a great many science-fiction stories involve precisely that scenario; a time traveller goes to a (usually unspecified) point in time before the outbreak of World War II or the Holocaust and kills Hitler. Usually, however, these stories ignore the real questions behind the notion of travelling back and killing Hitler.

‘When?’ must be the first question. Do you go back and kill Hitler as a child? Could you kill a child at all, even knowing the horrors that that child will grow up to unleash? Or else do you wait until Hitler is an adult? Do you go back to a point just after the formation of the Reich but before the beginning of the war? But by that point is it too late to change things for the better?

Another question that you’d have to ask yourself before you set the dials on your time machine is what else you’d be changing. Yes, you would be stopping the rise of one of the most evil men in history, but without World War II the Germans never invent the V2 rockets. Without the V2 project, some of the finest minds in the Space Race are never snapped up by the United States and men never walk on the Moon. After all, the work of several Nazi scientists was, and remains, vital to the exploration of space. Without the Space Race, we never get the many, many offshoot technologies that were created as a result of the scientific competition between the USA and the USSR – probably including time travel. Your time machine would start to fade out of existence as Hitler breathed his last, and you’d be left to deal with the German authorities. Enjoy that.

But really, the most important question is this: would killing Hitler actually change much at all? Hitler’s rise to power and the atrocities committed by his regime were symptoms of a larger problem, not the problem’s cause. It’s not as if Germany was a nation of peace-loving daisy chain-makers who were all hypnotised by Hitler’s moustache and uniforms. The appeal of Hitler lay in a deeply felt disillusionment among many Germans toward the political elite of the Weimar Republic, an elite that had presided over the national humiliation of defeat in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, terrible economic hardships in 1923 which had then been repeated in 1929, and what was widely perceived as the failed experiment of democracy. It is no accident that during the early 1930s it was the two parties who openly promised to abolish democracy, the Nazis and the Communists, which performed the best in German elections.

Even without Hitler, it’s still almost certain that the Nazis, or a party like them, would have come to power in Germany. The National Socialists were just one of many far-right political parties that sprung up in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, and pretty much all of them had mostly the same things to say. It’s just as likely that the German National People’s Party (which in reality merged with the Nazis in 1933) could have come to power – they did, after all, consistently perform well in elections throughout the Weimar Period (coming somewhere between second and fifth place in every election between 1919 and 1933), in stark contrast to the Nazis who only started to succeed in around 1930. These other far-right parties hated Jews, Slavs, Communists and other groups just as much as the Nazis did, and one of them would have almost certainly established a Nazi-like regime, which would in turn have led to World War II and the Holocaust, albeit in different forms than we might recognise them.

And what if that regime had been led by someone worse than Hitler? I know it seems difficult to imagine anybody worse than Hitler, but his downfall was essentially guaranteed by his own personality. Hitler was just the right combination of arrogant, controlling, stubborn and incompetent to mean that he made a terrible military strategist. As the war began to go against Germany, Hitler blamed his generals and became more and more insistent on commanding the war himself – a fatal mistake. By the war’s end, Hitler was commanding armies that only existed on his maps, and then having raging tantrums when those fictional armies failed to produce the results he wanted. Imagine, then, if someone with either a better grasp of military strategy or enough sense to admit when they don’t know something and leave it to the professionals had taken over in Germany. The Reich might have ended up winning the war.

I, personally, don’t understand why people want to go back and kill Hitler. Yes, he was an evil figure in history whose actions resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. But he lost. Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich lasted barely twelve years, and the unifying effect that Nazism had on its enemies was a key factor in creating the world as we know it today. Better, I think, to stick with the devil that we know than try to create a better situation when we don’t really know what we’re doing.

So if you do invent or stumble upon a time machine, why not answer one of the great mysteries of history instead? Find out who Jack the Ripper was.