The Hitler's murder paradox is a common trope of time travel fiction, where a character with access to time travel technology attempts to go back in time and murder Adolf Hitler before his rise to power in Germany, expecting to prevent World War II and The Holocaust from happening. In such storylines, the outcome is never as expected by the character.
The storylines involving this paradox have a character with access to a time machine, who attempts to "fix" history by murdering Adolf Hitler. The character reasons that, if Hitler never rises to power in Germany, then World War II and The Holocaust would never take place. This generates a temporal paradox, by the attempt of changing the past.
In some cases, the character simply fails to murder Hitler at all: he may fail in doing so, he may be convinced by other time travelers to give up the project, he may be stopped by the German army, or even by "guardians of time" that prevent such paradoxes. Stories with this approach work on the premise that the past can not be modified. The mere murder attempt may be formulated in such a way to fit or explain other specific real history events involving Hitler.
In other cases, the character may successfully murder Hitler, but without the expected results. For example, a new Führer may rise to power in Germany, and things would develop similarly. This approach rejects the Great Man theory: as WWII was the product of several economic, political and ideological causes, and not the will of a single man, then the loss of a single man would not be enough to stop the chain of events leading to it. The new Führer may even defeat the allies and triumph in the war, leading to a dystopia or a post-apocalyptic future. The character may then return to the past and prevent his own actions, to restore the timeline where Hitler ruled Germany and lost WWII. Common results of trying to assassinate Hitler in the past include:
1. The character not only fails to kill Hitler, but his actions themselves inadvertently bring about his rise to power.
2. A new, more competent Führer arises and defeats the allies in WWII.
3. Hitler is successfully assassinated, but without him, there is no major power to stop the threat of the Soviet Union, leading to Soviet domination of the whole of Europe or the world.
4. A true paradox is achieved, and a time loop results, where having killed Hitler, WWII does not occur, meaning the character in the future now has no reason to go back to change time, meaning he doesn't go back to change time, meaning Hitler is not assassinated, meaning WWII does occur, meaning the character has to go back and assassinate Hitler, and so on.
The paradox does not apply when there is no time travel involved. A story where the murder attempt is carried out exclusively by people from that time period (including depictions of the real failed attempts to murder Hitler), is simply historical fiction. If Hitler is successfully murdered in such a story, it would be a case of alternate history.
The theoretical murder of Hitler before raising to power, such as during his infancy, may also open discussions about the morality of it. At that point in time, Hitler would have not committed any crimes, and characters may discuss whenever he can be considered guilty of things that he had not done yet but would do in the future.
A concrete example of the above can be found in "The Little Book" by Selden Edwards, in which the protagonists find themselves in turn-of-the-century Vienna and travel to Hitler's hometown with the intention of killing him - but when encountering the boy Hitler on his way back from school, find themselves completely unable to kill an innocent boy even though he would grow up to become a terrible mass murderer.
|
|||||||||||||||||