If you could go back to 1889 and strangle Adolf Hitler in his crib, would you do it? At one level, the answer is obvious. Of course, you should. If there had been no Hitler, presumably the Nazi Party would have lacked the charismatic leader it needed to rise to power. Presumably, there would have been no World War II, no Holocaust, no millions dead on the Eastern and Western fronts.
But, on the other hand, if there were no World War II, you wouldn’t have had the infusion of women into the work force. You wouldn’t have had the G.I. Bill and the rapid expansion of higher education. You wouldn’t have had the pacification of Europe, Pax-Americana, which led to decades of peace and prosperity, or the end of the British and other empires.
History is an infinitely complex web of causations. To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now. You can’t go back and know then what you know now. You can’t step in the same river twice.
If the Roman army of 117 AD and the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan were to do battle, what would happen?
There’s an old saw that goes something like this:
Amateurs worry about strategy. Dilettantes worry about tactics. Professionals worry about logistics.
.. Logistics: horses need to eat 1.5% to 3% of their body weight in forage a day. Mongol horses were not large, but factor in 3 – 5 remounts for each Mongol warrior, and a Mongol army starts looking like a plague of locusts that has to move to survive. Mongol armies could not stay in any one place for long, within a brief period all available forage would be consumed and the Mongol army would have to move on or perish.
On the other side, the Roman army was primarily man-powered, not horse-powered. Men eat a lot less than horses and what they do eat is a lot easier to gather and store and protect.
Did the French blame themselves when they were easily defeated and occupied by Germany in WWII?
Everybody seems to ignore that the Brits sent their troops inFrance and these troops were swept away at the same speed as the French . By this time Churchill openly said that the only difference between Britain and France was the English Channel .
If Adolf Hitler had died while fighting during the WW1, who do you think would have lead Germany and the rest of the world into WW2? Do you possibly think WW2 would have not occurred at all?
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.