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So you think you can kill Hitler: Why travelling back in time to snuff out the Nazi leader isn’t so simple

More from Ishmael N. Daro | @iD4RO

German Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hitler giving the nazi salute during a rally. It seems unlikely any other contemporary could have replicated his uniquely evil legacy, Cosh writes.

You’re given a time machine. What’s the first thing you do?

If your idea is to travel back in time to assassinate Adolf Hitler, you’re not alone. It’s such a common impulse that it has become a trope that “everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.”

The Nazi leader oversaw the systematic murder of six million Jews — about three quarters of Europe’s Jewish population — as well as millions of communists, homosexuals, Roma people, and other “enemy” groups. The war he started in 1939 eventually claimed the lives of some 50 million people around the world.

It’s not surprising then that, given a time-machine, many people would choose to go back and take the Führer out of commission to prevent his crimes. But is it that simple? (No.)

A group of researchers recently looked at responses from more than 6,000 subjects in trying to determine how people resolve moral dilemmas. One scenario asked whether people would travel to the 1920s and kill Hitler — before Mein Kampf, before he had a mass following and long before he put his genocidal plans into practice. As the researchers discovered, more men than women were willing to commit this act if it meant forestalling war and massacre. Women, however, were more likely to feel conflicted over what to do, and having to commit murder was more likely to convince them to let Hitler live.

Whether you feel comfortable killing an innocent person to save many other lives depends on your own moral code, and whether you take a deontological or utilitarian view. Deontology, most famously championed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, holds that actions are either right or wrong by themselves, irrespective of their consequences. As such, committing murder is always a moral crime, even if your victim is history’s greatest monster. Utilitarians, though, would contend that the lives of millions of Hitler’s victims easily outweigh his.

Randall Munroe/XKCD

Ethical questions aside, there is still plenty else to worry about. As countless science-fiction works have explored, time travel is fraught with risks.

You, the daring time traveller, could kill Hitler only to allow an even worse person to assume control of the Third Reich. Germany in the 1920s was a fractured society in a deep economic depression and rife with radicals, so it’s not inconceivable that Hitler’s rise prevented a more efficient megalomaniac from coming to power and actually winning the Second World War, thereby changing the whole course of history for the worse.

There are also more practical reasons why killing Hitler may not work. For one, it could be that his guards are very good at fighting off time travellers, seeing as there are so many of them showing up at the Führer’s doorstep, ray gun in hand, ready to change the past. That’s the scenario envisioned in an issue of the web comic Subnormality, which shows two of Hitler’s bodyguards efficiently dispatching the umpteenth time-travelling assassin before one expresses some creeping doubt: “It’s these constant attempts on his life by time travellers! I mean, you kind of have to wonder!”

Or perhaps Hitler would simply overpower you and steal your time machine, as imagined by Norwegian cartoonist John Arne Sæterøy in his 2007 graphic novel I Killed Adolf Hitler. Congratulations, you’re responsible for Space Emperor Hitler!

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty

The biggest hurdle to overcome would be the paradoxes inherent in changing the past. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Grandfather Paradox, which posits that going back in time to kill your own grandfather would prevent your own birth, thereby making it impossible for you to kill your grandfather. But there’s also a Killing Hitler paradox, in which your decision to snuff out little Adolf’s life in the crib would erase your own motivation for travelling back in time to kill him.

There’s also a good chance we’re already past the point of no return. According to the Chaos Theory, minor changes in one place magnify and can have make a monumental difference elsewhere. This butterfly effect could mean that humanity’s window of opportunity to travel back and give Herr Hitler his due is already closed. Maybe someone travelling back from the 1950s or ’60s could have undone Hitler’s damage with a well-placed bullet and returned home to a place she might recognize, but do so today and you might return to 2015 to find nothing but a barren wasteland — all because you stepped on a beetle on your way to Hitler’s house.

It’s obvious why killing one of the greatest mass murderers in history is appealing. It seems so simple, but actually doing so would open a whole can of ethical, philosophical and temporal worms. Time travel is no joke.

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