Sparked by this episode I randomly saw of 100 Questions:
I’m a big fan of alternate history settings, and this theorising all factors in to my own imagined Deathzap setting. So I asked myself the question, should you kill baby Hitler?
First off no. I know this is the usual format of the question, but let’s not go about murdering babies (even if they are Hitler). I couldn’t imagine the trauma of having to kill a child, let alone a baby, and having to debate in your own mind for the rest of your life if that really was the best thing to do, and having to come to terms with the fact that you were capable of killing a baby. Is this what psychopaths are for?
So let’s not kill Baby Hitler. Instead let’s meet him on the battlefields of WW1 and take steady aim with our rifle. So Hitler’s now dead, just one among the millions of casualties of the First World War.
Now my initial worry was that if in our parallel universe… or this one if we developed time travel and pulled it off, how many of our own births have we just erased? The basic assumption is that without Hitler WW2 and the Holocaust doesn’t happen. If that were the case, the population of the world would be so different as a result, who’s Great Grandparents, Grandparents and parents meet someone else and produce a world of entirely different people? Plus there’s the added impact of even if the right people did meet, with even a slight shift in time, you probably wouldn’t have been born anyway, but instead one of the innumerable number of possible siblings you didn’t have.
Not to mention with the lack of the Second World War how much would the global psyche be impacted? So, if you were to be born, how different would your personality be? Though again I’m not sure how ‘you’ would be born in that scenario… like people are souls coming from a higher dimension or something? But the point stands that not only are we gene based, possibly spiritually based to some extent (depending on what you believe on that front), we’re also environmentally based. Change the environment, culture, national identities and you change the people in big ways.
Though, all of that change could be peanuts when weighing it up against the cost of human life lost in WW2 and the Holocaust. But then, who is qualified to make such calculations? Probably only some kind of deity.
The Second World War was also massively responsible for much modern technological developments. What would the impact to our world now, if all you did was remove those things? Electronic computing, frequency hopping (which laid the groundwork for Blue Tooth and WiFi), radar, jet engines and atomic bombs (though we could probably do without those).
Anywho… theological and technological considerations aside.
My first concern is, what if the Nazis still come to power in Germany, but they have someone smarter in Hitler’s place. What if that person avoids all of Adolf’s mistakes that historians tell us about and makes the right decisions and leads the Third Reich to victory? Especially Hitler’s tendency to micromanage. We’ve had a taste of what that world might look like in The Man In The High Castle, and it might be worth avoiding that reality even if there is only a small percentage chance it would come to fruition. Though I could imagine there would be significant difficulties in maintaining Nazi control of the entirety of Europe. The massive number of resistance movements alone would be a nightmare, and then there’s the idea that extremism tends to eat itself over time. In the nightmare scenario where the Nazis win, they never ‘finish’ the Holocaust, because the Holocaust is incapable of solving the problems it claims it would. In fact it just creates far more problems, but once your multiple millions of people deep, an extremist dictatorship is unlikely to put its hands up and admit the mistake, it’s far more likely to double down and keep digging that hole, until there’s no one left.
What if with the removal of Hitler, the Nazis don’t rise to prominence, but instead a German Communist party? Maybe WW2 doesn’t kick off at the same time, likely a few years later, where Western powers attempt to stop Communist expansion. This time with Britain, France, America and possibly Japan, facing off against Germany, Russia and China with whatever Eastern European nations Communism will have now risen in. Of course this is all theoretical, but I imagine it would be a much longer and worse WW2 than the one we had. While the Soviet Union wasn’t as antisemitic as the Nazis, it’s impossible to know how the cocktail of Western European antisemitism and Eastern would have mixed, and since any dictatorship loves a scapegoat to blame all of its failings on, you wouldn’t necessarily avoid the Holocaust in this scenario either.
Germany was in a bad state post WW1, effectively taking the brunt of the blame, and being hit with reparations that only sought to destabilise them as a nation and inevitably have the people turn to an extremist leader (Hitler or otherwise if we’ve time travelled and killed him). America was doing its best to help them out with the Dawes and Young plans, and had they continued in earnest Germany may have recovered and returned to a more stable state. But then the Wall Street Crash happened and the Great Depression. Without that support Germany turned to the scary kinds of people who claimed they could fix things quickly.
So maybe instead of killing baby Hitler, what you really need to do is put a stop to the bad economic practices that lead to the Wall Street Crash like unrealistic stock prices, buying on margin, overproduction and wealth inequality (maybe the Communists have a point).
It’s fun to theorise though. Feel free to point out any flaws in my GCSE level understanding of the situation, bolstered by a couple of documentaries.
Deathzap 