Killing baby Hitler or his parents ?

[♘Top Hat Zebra]

Perhaps Im just a cautious person at heart, but given the ability to change anything in the past, I would change nothing. Especially not something so important.


WWII was a monumental event in human history. If it never happened... There are too many events to even comprehend how the world would be different. Even my country alone, the US, would be unrecognizable without WWII.

Even given the horror of everything that happened, I could not in good conscience plunge the world into the deep end with absolutely no idea how it would turn out.

The question you're really asking, I presume, is, "Would you kill a baby if you knew, for a fact, that it would make the world a better place or, at least, prevent the world from becoming a horrible place?"

In which case I would say, if killing the baby were my only choice in this hypothetical, then yeah, I guess so. Assuming I was omniscient and knew exactly what would happen if I didn't kill it.

[thefarsidenoob]

Fact of the matter is, if you killed Hitler a baby, or if that British soldier had actually taken the shot and killed Hitler in WWI, it would not have changed the fact that the Treaty of Versailles set the stage for the rise of fascism, and another worldwide conflict in which millions would die. I doubt that killing Hitler would have prevented atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, the Holodomor, that were far to prevalent in the 20th Century. And who knows what would have happened to Europe without the rise and fall of Hitler? Can one say with certainty it would be a better place than it is today? The trolley problem isn't so simple when it tossed into the intricate web of history.

[War lord]

Hitler and his rise to power was a result of the Values and Norms of the era. The 20th century needed something like WWII to happen to discredit ideas like Antisemitism, Eugenics and Colonialism.