this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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In my view, it would be naive to assume that killing Hitler before he became Chancellor would guarantee the prevention of the atrocities that followed, and it might even pose the risk of something worse happening. Events don't occur in a vacuum. It's similar to how dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific events in themselves, but who's to say those events aren't the reason nukes have never been used in warfare since? Preventing those bombings might have saved the people in those cities, but it also might have significantly lowered the bar for using nukes, increasing the chance of a true nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, for example.
So maybe time travel is possible, and someone did try to change history by killing Hitler, but then realized the outcome was even worse. Now, they needed an additional assassin to deal with the first one.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have prevented the future that the video game series Fallout predicts, as that never happened in their past.
There's an interesting theory that Hitler was put in place by time travelers as the last-bad option that wouldn't destroy the timeline.
Hitler (and Trump) made a number of blundering errors that any idiot should've/known better than to make. Had a competent, or even a supervillain-type been in charge, things could've turned out even worse than they did. You don't have to look far- some of these villains attach themselves to those in power. Himmler and Heydrich would've been far worse for the world, but were somewhat limited by not being the ones directly in power.