The butterfly effects would add up and and any zygote formed would not be the hitler-as-we-know anymore, since it would be a different combination of sperm and eggs.
Who needs guns when you got a time machine? Don’t like your highschool bully, just bump into their parents back in time. Or you know, “bump” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) into their parents.
Let’s say you’re right and you’ve prevented the birth of Adolf or altered him to send him to another life trajectory. Who is to say that there wouldn’t be another mad person, naturally a man, who would rise to power and commit similar if not even worse crimes. It’s not only the person that made the fuehrer possible, it’s also everything happening in the world, especially politics at the time. So you’ve bumped Adolf but you’ve created Anton who was similarly radicalized but he wasn’t a landscape painter, he was a physics major and he made Germany develop nuclear weapons much faster. So now you have to go back and disturb Anton’s conception. Which brings about fuehrer Armin and so forth. You might be stuck in a time loop you’ll never be able to stop because you can’t control all the variables.
They told me to “get rid of hitler” and I technically acomplished the mission. 🤷♂️
Just following orders?
Ah… shit… here we go again…
All you had to do was follow the damn train (to Auschwitz) CJ!
For real, there was nothing particularly special about Hitler that made him the one and only being of his type.
It was a confluence of multiple differing things, the emergence of new media technologies, and the ability to repeat a single message over and over again to as many people as needed to hear them without any equally as loud voices of dissent.
Combine that with an incredible financial depression and the consequences of an ill thought war being foisted upon your country’s shoulders.
Admittedly, it was his own personal biases against the Jewish people that caused the Holocaust, and the Aktion T4 was similarly born out of his hatred of people with mental disabilities.
In any case, if you take a miserable nation, give them a lightning rod to direct all of the misery of their own lives at, and an eloquent or charismatic leader to tell them it is okay to vent their frustrations on the helpless people that surround them, then you too can create another Hitler.
Without the Holocaust, there’d have been no international horror over the atrocities of concentration camps, gas chambers, human experimentation, genocide. Anti-Jewish sentiment was rampant around the world.
Progressives made a lot of progress off the back of WWII, and the anti-fascist sentiment in the US that survived until the greatest generation died and their grandchildren took over. It’s entirely possible that, without WWII, the fascism we see in the US today would have happened much earlier, and we’d have run our own concentration camps.
Ironically, the people who probably would have benefited most from preventing “Hitler” would be the modern Palestinians, because without Hitler, Israel would not exist today, and it wouldn’t be carrying out a genocide.
Reminds me a bit of the setting for the Red Alert series of games. Although there they actually go back in time and kill Hitler so different from the scenario in this post but the possible alternate timelines are fun to think about.