Given the harshness of the conditions imposed on Germany after WWI and the revanchism they engendered, I think WWII was very likely to happen even without Hitler.
The scary part is that if you remove him from the scene, you might have ended up with a party resembling Italy fascism in Germany. Devoid of the anti-semitic madness, a fascist Germany might have kept the scientists that made the atomic bomb working for them. Once Germany had the bomb, the Soviet Union would copy it, just like it did with the American one. Britain, France and the USA would do so as well.
Imagine WWII starting between 1945 and 1950 with a nuclear armed Germany facing a nuclear armed France and/or Soviet Union. Whole cities would be vaporized. It would make the losses sustained in the European theater of the war to pale in comparison.
Maybe that’s the reason why no time travellers ever attempt to kill Hitler.
Germany, the Green Superpower
“I have a friend who comes home, and, if the sun is shining, he doesn’t even say hello to his wife. He first goes downstairs and looks at the meter to see what [electricity] he has produced himself. … The idea now is that energy is something you can [produce] on your own.
Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?
It has become increasingly difficult to sustain the view, rooted in wartime allied propaganda and given more sophisticated expression in the work of the dominant school of left-liberal West Germans of the 1970s to 1990s, that the roots of nazism lay deep in the German past. Often seen against the long-term background of modern German history since the era of Bismarck’s unification of the country in the 19th century, the Third Reich is now increasingly also viewed in a broader international, even global context, as part of the age of imperialism, its drive for domination building on a broader tradition of the German quest for empire.
.. In the new, transnational vision that has emerged among historians in our own era of globalisation, nazism appears as an ideology drawing on sources from many countries, from Russia to France, Italy to Turkey, rather than being the culmination of exclusively German intellectual traditions, as the historians of the postwar generation argued. Racial doctrines borrowed from the French theorist Arthur de Gobineau were married to a distorted version of social Darwinism originating in Britain, antisemitism derived from Russian and French writers was fused with anti-Bolshevism imported from the Whites in the Russian civil war, the worship of violence and hatred of parliamentarism taken from Mussolini’s Italian fascist movement were joined to ideas of national reawakening taken from Kemal Atatürk’s nationalist revolution in Turkey.
How effective was the German defense of Germany in WW2?
What made the German Army so effective was that every soldier was expected to think, not just follow orders, and take effective independent action to achieve a goal. The Russian Army was exactly the opposite. The Russian soldier was expected to do nothing more than follow orders, even to his detriment and was punished severely for independent thinking. As a result, the Germans were able to accomplish astounding feats, because everyone was thinking, not just the commander who might have limited situational awareness.
.. Bagration, the Russian attack in the East, was the most successful offensive operation along a long front in the history of warfare. Despite warnings from Gehlen and German Generals such as Kietel that the entire Eastern Front was a house of cards, Hitler wouldn’t let the Germans retreat and the Russians cut through them like a knife through butter.
.. He made his astounding “battle cuff” order so shaming the German Army, telling his SS men that they were no longer worthy of wearing a divisional battle cuff. For men fighting to the last man despite being severely wounded, with no equipment and for a lost cause, this was not a good morale builder. General Balck refused to implement the order at risk to his own life, but by then, it was just weeks before the end
.. Something like 75,000 Allied aircraft were destroyed by the Germans during the war
.. Had they been well supplied and manned, the Germans could have held off the Allies indefinitely, but their shortages kept them on the run.