http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct

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

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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? 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 work that way.

First of all, it often proves near-impossible to kill the man in the first place; like most dictators he's protected by various bodyguards and security forcesnote and sheer luck. After all, the guy survived about 42 (known) real life assassination attempts — maybe one of them was (or will have been) yours! Trying to circumvent these by targeting him before his rise to power begins will usually turn out to be ludicrously difficult as well. Locating a lone, disillusioned war veteran wandering around post-WWI Europe is perhaps the ultimate needle-in-a-haystack search.

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Secondly, even if you do manage to kill him, something as bad or worse might appear in his place: an even smarter and crueler Führer who wins the war; or Josef Stalin takes advantage of the fact that Germany isn't invading Russia in this new timeline and the Soviet Union starts World War II; or Japan starts its own invasion with giant mecha. In addition, if it wasn't for Hitler's nightmarish slaughter of "undesirables" that took place under his leadership, the rest of the world wouldn't have experienced the sort of collective shock upon discovery of the Holocaust that spurred them into beginning the process of purging racist elements from their own nations. After all, the American Civil Rights movement, the end of colonial minority rule in places like India, and other rejections of systems of "racial superiority" only started to take place seriously after the Holocaust. To do otherwise was to essentially agree with Hitler's beliefs, something that no sane person would even contemplate after 1945. It might help that the World War's tumult destabilised the European powers, making them focus on protecting themselves rather than oppressing colonies. If someone does kill Hitler, they'll almost always have to undo it to prevent this.

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Even worse, if you manage to kill Hitler with no backfire, millions will be saved and the second world war will be averted. So you get a Temporal Paradox, where Hitler's death means the Holocaust never happened, which means you will have no reason to go back in time and kill Hitler to begin with, which means you won't, which means Hitler will live, which means that millions will die in the world war and extermination camps, which means that you will go back in time and kill Hitler... after a while you'll start to either get a migraine, wind up in an Alternate Timeline, or perhaps just break time entirely, ending more lives than a billion Hitlers ever could.

There's also the Critical Existence Failure of the time traveling assassin — unless you were miraculously lucky, or an alien who stumbled upon 1930s Germany on their own with no assistance from modern humans in any way, you couldn't assassinate Hitler without undoing your own existence. Because Hitler/WWII/The Holocaust had such an effect on the entire world, every human born after the event owes their existence to it. All the world's pairings were affected by the war. Preventing the war prevents the mothers and fathers of everyone from being in the right place at the right time to create the future generations that occurred — they would instead have had offspring with other people than they did in our timeline, or had them at different times, which prevents the time traveling assassin from ever existing. (Technically, this is true of all instances of changing the past, thanks to chaos theory; it's just that WWII was so far-reaching in its effects that attempts to change it is far more likely to come back and bite you than say, killing a random tiger in the Siberian wilderness.)

In short, it appears to be a cosmic law that something bad has to go down in the period between 1933 and 1945. 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. It may also be that Hitler, for all that he's considered the pinnacle of modern evil, is still a creature of his time and place; killing one man who did evil doesn't get rid of the circumstances and structure that put him in the position to do evil in the first place.

Some people could reasonably be offended by a story that treats centuries of anti-Semitism like the work of one man. Preventing World War II by one guy playing James Bond or Superman arguably denigrates the efforts of the Real Life soldiers who died to win it. The war is a sensitive subject in general, for obvious reasons, so such a story might never be published.

On the narrative side of things, consider the Anthropic Principle at work. Who would read a story in which someone tries to change history for the better, succeeds, and most impossibly of all, creates an utopian timeline that isn't turned into a Crapsack World by a Butterfly of Doom and/or infested with Clock Roaches, and thus doesn't need to be undone at the end (refer back to above and how much of our social progress and technology were directly a result of WWII)? Plus, the idea of pitting meticulous planning and futuristic technology against a 1930s-era failed artist would be a Curb-Stomp Battle - the story would just come out to "Pew! Hitler dies." What about the other 299 pages of the book?

Ironically, it would seem that neither FDR nor Churchill (or even Stalin, when allied with them) has this immunity, because stories come up all the time about heroes having to undo a mad would-be Nazi's altering the outcome of World War II using time travel. Clearly, this is because villains simply don't care about any of the stated consequences.

Compare Joker Immunity and Godwin's Law of Time Travel. This is a sub-trope of Precrime Arrest, where anyone is punished for crimes they've already committed from the perspective of the time-traveler. This is one case where attempts to Prevent the War are ultimately counterproductive.

Vox has an eight minute YouTube video about where this trope came from. It's called Would you use time travel to kill baby Hitler?

See the Analysis page for musings on how this trope might have worked in Real Life had Hitler actually died prematurely. One last thing to think about: Is it moral if someone just shoots him before he does any evil? Do the ends justify the means?

Examples

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Anime and Manga

In the Devilman story "Late Spring in Vienna", 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 a poor painter that has no choice - he would have preferred 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 come back to their time, hoping that history is in good shape after what they did. 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!" Made somewhat ironic by the fact that in real life, Hitler sucked at drawing people.

Subverted in Zipang. The hit is performed by someone of that time period acting on information from time travellers. An attempt was made by an IJN officer because he knows from the time-displaced crew of the Mirai, that the Axis would lose no matter what and of the sufferings of the Japanese people after the war. To prevent that, he tried to kill Hitler so the war would end quickly and Japan could get a peace treaty with good terms. He failed.

A fictional non-Hitler example of the same conundrum defines the last act of PandoraHearts. Oswald, an antagonist, wants to go back in time and prevent the Tragedy of Sablier, a cataclysmic event that occurred 100 years ago, almost destroyed the world, functionally annihilated Oswald's city, traumatized most of the cast, and whose consequences are nearing destroying the world again. However, the Tragedy was driven by underlying tensions and issues that had gone unaddressed until erupting into the open so violently, meaning that erasing the Tragedy wouldn't remove the problems that actually caused it, only the specific happenstance triggers that Oswald knows of from this particular timeline—and even if Oswald does succeed, he will be destroying the existence of every person who lived after the moment that he changed. The protagonists find this last part unacceptable, positioning that a solution for those in the present and the future is the only way to actually move forward in regards to these underlying problems—however difficult it is to live with, leaving the past to the past is the only way to move on from it.

Comic Books

Film

Literature

Live Action TV

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.

, 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.

Spoofed in Anal Cunt's "I Went Back In Time And Voted For Hitler", wherein the singer doesn't go back in time to kill Hitler but instead to vote for him.

Other Sites

SCP Foundation, Characters/SCPFoundation, SCP-2451 ("Love Through Time, Space and Species") . SCP-2451 is created by an attempt by the American military to send one of the soldiers back in time to kill Hitler, only for seemingly nothing to happen. However, said soldier winds up becoming a walking temporal anomaly, through which other time travelers from other dimensions exit to kill their historical genocidal tyrants.

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 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 embarrassed the credited author. The less genre savvy readers included Holocaust survivors and the Anti-Defamation League, who had trouble with the premise that slaughtering 6,000,000+ Jews (and others) might make the world better.

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. It's also acknowledged, in a way, in the GURPS Infinite Worlds setting (which is more about crosstime travel). Some agents of Centrum (the antagonist timeline) have noticed that Homeliners get downright irrational (or even more so than usual) about timelines where Hitler exists, especially if he's winning. To Centrum, he's just another genocidal despot like so many in (other people's) history. The GURPS WW2 sourcebook, in a passage concerning the use of Infinite Worlds and time travel, gives this very trope as an unnerving example of a quest hook, about the players having to go back in time to protect Hitler lest he gets assassinated and a far more skilled leader takes his place and wins the war for Germany.

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 among timecops who have to protect the Nazis.

In the time-travel RPG Continuum, the Fraternity of Thespians use various disguises and impersonate historical figures throughout time to prevent Narcissists from changing the Known universe. It's very rude to ask them how many times they've had to impersonate Hitler; the common reply is "Further information is not available here."

Feng Shui uses this trope in order to explain how superficial shifts (changes to temporal events that don't involve capturing Feng Shui sites) work in the setting. If you killed Hitler in the 19th century hoping to keep Nazism and its various atrocities from going down, it would not work, because somebody else would simply take Hitler's place.

In TimeWatch, the titular organization has a permanent base in Berlin specifically to deal with all the people who get their hands on time travel tech and decide to go kill Hitler. It's very busy.

Toys

Beast Wars: Uprising: One of the major nails in the backstory is that, during a version of the events of Beast Wars, Beast War's Megatron managed to get away with shooting Optimus Prime in the head, but before she could vanish from existence, Blackarachnia managed to fatally poison G1 Megatron in return. The result was that without Megatron, the Autobot / Decepticon war proved far more destructive to Earth, and just in general.

Video Games

Visual Novels

Heinz Heger in Shikkoku no Sharnoth has apparently been going for something like this. Whether it works or not is left ambiguous, but he himself views it as a failure.

Web Comics

Web Original

Western Animation

Other

Atlanta Radio Theatre Company , who do audio dramas in the vein of old-fashioned Radio Drama, has a story called The Assassins, where the time traveler trying to halt World War II 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.

, who do audio dramas in the vein of old-fashioned Radio Drama, has a story called The Assassins, where the time traveler trying to halt World War II 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 Orphanage, 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.

The short play If You Could Go Back... presents the scenario where the scientist that created the machine has to send her layabout roommate to stop the assassin she herself sent multiple times, as in each iteration they try and assassinate Hitler earlier and earlier in his career, and each version only makes things worse. At the ending, the scientist goes back to Hitler's childhood and talks to him and hugs him - changing his nature rather than adding violence to a violent world. Not that that changes the end result - a new dictator arises and does the exact same thing.

presents the scenario where the scientist that created the machine has to send her layabout roommate to stop the assassin she herself sent multiple times, as in each iteration they try and assassinate Hitler earlier and earlier in his career, and each version only makes things worse. At the ending, the scientist Not that that changes the end result - a new dictator arises and does the exact same thing. 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.

takes a moment from stealing cereal through time and creating paradoxes to explain why it won't work. Why the grandfathers? asks Lore Sjöberg in this short story.

asks Lore Sjöberg in this short story. This ad for Mercedes has Hitler being run over by a car as a child, as the car "detects dangers before they come up". Not surprisingly, the ad was rejected.

ad for Mercedes has Hitler being run over by a car as a child, as the car "detects dangers before they come up". Not surprisingly, the ad was rejected. Referenced in Real Life when the Austrian town where Hitler was born was captured by the Allies. Among the residents who spoke up at a meeting where the townsfolk decided to surrender without a fight was the elderly midwife who'd aided in Hitler's birth. She pointed out that their town would already suffer a black mark throughout history, in part because she hadn't strangled him as a newborn; as much as she wished she'd done so, the shames of the past couldn't be changed, and putting up a futile resistance now would only reinforce that stain.

Dean Burnett, writing for The Guardian, argues against assassinating Hitler here , on the basis that it's impossible to know whether doing so would make things worse (amongst other things).

, on the basis that it's impossible to know whether doing so would make things worse (amongst other things). The Washington Post article "You should not kill Baby Hitler. Try this instead." recognizes the futility of killing Baby Hitler and instead proposes that kidnapping Hitler as a child and raising him in Britain would be best.

Besides, you know who And you don't want to be like Hitler , do you?