if you had the chance to go back in time and kill adolf hitler as a small child would you be able to do it?

Answer 1

I wouldn't kill him, I would steal him and
give him in adoption to a Jew family

Answer 2

Good question. I have often thought about it. There are problems with this type of idea about the consequences of tampering with time. If you killed Hitler perhaps even worse things would have happened - how do you know. However, I think that if these doubts were removed then yes, no problem, I'd put cyanide in his food. That is how he eventually killed himself anyway - along with a bullet in the brain - the cyanide was just to make sure. The selfish little prick deserved worse, but thats life!

A more humane way would have been to have made sure he got accepted into the Vienna Arts Academy as a young man. He would then have ended his days as an architect or something.

In the end though there are so many factors involved that we cannot be sure that Hitler was the prime one, perhaps if the Allies had treated Germany better at the end of the First World War, perhaps if anti semitic ideas and eugenics had not become so prevalent in Europe in the mid-late nineteenth century... so many 'what if's'.

There are some great essays by historians about what would have happened if... check out the book below.

Answer 3

This questoin has been posed to me before. I've said that I would do everything in my power to ensure that he never came to power. I don't think I would kill him, especially if he was a child. But there is one problem with this idea. Suppose you did stop him. If that were the case you may have inadvertently stopped your own conception. Think about it. WW II had massive consequences, in Europe especially. I'm from Ireland which was neutral in WW II but would this massive change in history change your/my future? Let me give you an example.
Some years ago, I saw a great episode of The Ray Bradbury Theatre (a sci fi tv series) on tv. A group of millionaires discover this company that has invented time travel. They offer tours where you go back to the age of the dinosaurs. Walk on this elevated walkway amongst the jungle, find a sick or close to death dinosaur and shoot it. The ultimate rich man's safari and the walkway I mentioned has an important function, So this rich dentist takes advantage of this offer and travels back in time. When standing on the walkway he sees a real dinosaur and panics. He jumps off the walkway and runs away before being rescued by his guide. They enter their time machine and return to there own time. They come out of the time machine to be welcomed by a nazi officer! They all look at each other perplexed until the safari guide notices a large dead prehistoric butterfly stuck to the boot of the dentist who ran away in panic. The guide explains to the dentist that because he killed that butterfly, and because it was so long ago that he changed the course of their evolution and this effect was multipled as time went on.The right people were'nt born at the right time to defeat Hitler. The guide used the analogy of throwing a stone into a pond. After a period of time the ripples would expand and reach out getting bigger and bigger until they disrupted the entire pond. The killing of the butterfly could be considered the stone and the ripples, the passage of time. Interesting question and I know some people will post answers like "time travel is impossible" etc. but it's still an interesting theoretical question.

Answer 4

If you could go back into time and were able to kill Hitler when he was a baby, would you do it? You wouldn't dare kill him, haven't you learned not to mess with the space time continuum?

Consider the possible consequence. You kill Hitler as a young child, years later, say 1933, Ernst Roehm instead becomes dictator, in mid 1930s, HE decides to begin 'heavy water' experiments which lead to the first nuclear bomb built in 1939. With that device, he easiliy defeats mother russia and the allies, and the Final Solution is 'completed.'

Your mistep in the space time continuum caused the death of ALL European Jewry and enslavement of half the planet...way to go!....you should'a stayed home in bed where it was safe and leave the living to others..

Answer 5

No, because that would change the history of the world. There is a paradox at work here that not many people recognize. Say you killed Hitler. Your parents or grandparents met because of World War II which was started by Hitler. If they hadn't met, your parents and subsequently you, wouldn't have been born. If you hadn't been born, how could you go back and kill Hitler?

Answer 6

No, but not for any moral or religious reasons... The past has already happened, and we all know what happened and how it turned out. If you went back and killed Hitler as a child, then you would radically alter the future (todays present) and no one could predict the consequences. Maybe we'd all be speaking Russian or Chinese today.

I kind of like the way the world is today, and I'd rather keep it this way. (OK... maybe gas prices could be a bit lower...)

Answer 7

Why kill him? We would not be living the way we are now. Killing Hitler would change the course of the world and who knows how bad or good it would be. Would you take the chance to make the matters even worse.

Answer 8

Yes,I would,no problem.The only bad thing about killing Hitler as a small child would the future that i would return to.Everything would be drastically different to a degree that I would not know anybody,my parents never meeting in Scotland,me never existing...tom science

Answer 9

As a child he wouldn't have formed the prejudices he had in his later life, so is an innocent and to kill any innocent, especially a small child you'd have to be totally psychotic. Instead I would raise himself and teach him about other cultures and hope that he would become a good member of society.

Answer 10

No- if i were to go back in time and do anything for Adolf Hitler- I would help him get into that art school that rejected him.

That's the only reason he went into Politics anyway.

Killing him would only put my own soul into damnation.

The only people who kill babies are people like Mary Bell.

Answer 11

Academic question. A time traveller can only observe a different time line, by intervening in any, even a tiny way would change the whole time line of events and the person concerned and the rest of humanity could disappear. I obviously watch too much Dr Who, but the answer can only be the same, we cannot change the past, but we can (hopefully) learn from it.