If you can travel through time, would you kill baby Hitler

Would you kill baby Hitler?

  • Total voters
    23
HammerDown said:
John, read Adolf Hitler by John Toland. After you do, I'll let you buy me a beer. 🍻

The author despises Hitler and the Nazis but after reading the book, you fully understand where "Hitler" came from. He was a human, even if the most hated ever.

The whole thing of what critical mistakes Hitler made that cost them the war is fascinating, too. The most ironic of all is that if Hitler, et al had just used the Jews in the military, they'd have fought like wild animals like they did in WWI. Instead they squandered vast resources on containing and eliminating them.

The military blunders are a study in themselves. William Shirer, in The Rise and Fall... boiled it all down to this simple fact: the basic reason why the allies won and Germany lost is because Winston Churchill was constrained by the Generals and Hitler was not.
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Russia more than anything else was Hitler's undoing. That is where many of his poor military decisions began. The early successes in Western Europe clearly fueled his ego to the point he thought no one knew better than him. Shirer's book is excellent. A great read of history.
 
HammerDown said:
I'd argue that half a dozen bungles by the British completely nullified all the penalties of the Versailles Treaty. Neville Chamberlain in Munich was enough to do that. In fact, one author on my list has recently written a book laying much of the blame for WW2 at the hands of a no doubt well-intentioned but pacifist Neville Chamberlain.

What Hitler accomplished from 1933 - 1939 despite the Treaty of Versailles will go down as unprecedented in human history.
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France also. Neither wanted to go to war again and they wanted to avoid conflict at all cost. Hitler broke numerous agreements and the countries allowed it to continue. Both France and England screwed the Chechs.
 
Pattersonca65 said:
Russia more than anything else was Hitler's undoing. That is where many of his poor military decisions began. The early successes in Western Europe clearly fueled his ego to the point he thought no one knew better than him. Shirer's book is excellent. A great read of history.
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Impossible to disagree. Not even his sycophants in the general staff agreed with him on that. Hitler knew at Stalingrad that they could never win.
Pattersonca65 said:
France also. Neither wanted to go to war again and they wanted to avoid conflict at all cost. Hitler broke numerous agreements and the countries allowed it to continue. Both France and England screwed the Chechs.
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Yes, for various reasons they were desperate for peace.
 
Avengers Endgame taught me that this is a bunch of bullshit.
 
Snuffing out some rando baby in 1889 would have prevented World War I?
 
How about travelling back to 1838 finding 20 year old Karl Marx and introducing him to Hookers and Blow.
 
Cobrabit said:
No

Not because I just wouldn't kill an innocent (an infant), but Hitler was not some singular force, that with his demise, WWII would not exist. The pot was stirred and he just happened to lend his voice, albeit a tremendous orator. Sanctions against Germany following WWI were tremendous, and another would have took up the role of leader to the fascism ideal, should Hitler not have been alive. Arguably, he was actually a detriment due to many of his wartime decisions and another leader may have actually succeeded in the conquest.

Hitler was essentially a symptom, not the disease.

If provided the opportunity to time travel, you could always remove baby Hitler from his family, never allowed his parents to meet, or even just let him into art school to avoid the moral dilemma of killing an innocent to save millions. However, it wouldn't have mattered.


This same exercise could be applied to the American Revolution and the British soldier that had the opportunity to take out Washington early in the war, but didn't pull the trigger because Washington's back was turned. If he had, would that have prevented the American victory overall?
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I'd put that piece of shit in a leaky boat with Ken Dryden and send it out to sea. When those two babies started crying I would unload a couple thousands rounds from the Ma Deuce I have mounted on my party barge and I would revel in the knowledge that I have changed history for a region and a nation!
 
GreenNickle said:
How about travelling back to 1838 finding 20 year old Karl Marx and introducing him to Hookers and Blow.
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The world would be a better place if Marx had been introduced to a bullet in the head.
 
Stalin, yes.
Hitler, no. If the Bolshies didn't starve millions to death and enable Stalin to take over and kill millions more, the Germans never would have sought such a heavy handed revenge.
Killing Trotsky might have saved all the Russians, WWII and the endless parade of State genocide in the last century.
 
HammerDown said:
Zero doubt about it. The "Hitler survived" hoax is one of the worst ever. Lots of fun to consider but he was a shattered, dying man who welcomed death.
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He was so strung out on opioids and meth by that point he was a dead man walking.
 
HammerDown said:
The biggest problem was he had advanced Parkinson's
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Chicken or the egg? Given the massive drug abuse problem he had, which came first?
 
Rex Racer said:
Chicken or the egg? Given the massive drug abuse problem he had, which came first?
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I know little or nothing about the drug problem other than it's rumored that his personal physician was giving him cocaine, much like Kennedy's drug cocktails. I heard there's a new book out about it but it's hard to understand where any real new evidence is coming from.
 
JuiceTheGator said:
Stalin, yes.
Hitler, no. If the Bolshies didn't starve millions to death and enable Stalin to take over and kill millions more, the Germans never would have sought such a heavy handed revenge.
Killing Trotsky might have saved all the Russians, WWII and the endless parade of State genocide in the last century.
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From my perspective the 3 main issues that sunk Nazi Germany were in order;

Hitler's insistence on attacking the Russians before he had completely secured the western front.

Believing that he could win a war of attrition with his eastern neighbors, especially since he sent his boys in to Russia ill equipped for the weather they were about to encounter.

His fetish for Teutonic engineering. There was no reason for his war industry to waste their time and money manufacturing some of their war machines to the nth degree when the life expectancy of a tank was 3 weeks etc. Wasting their time and resources on futuristic weapons prototypes was a massive drag on the Nazi war machine as well.
 
HammerDown said:
I know little or nothing about the drug problem other than it's rumored that his personal physician was giving him cocaine, much like Kennedy's drug cocktails. I heard there's a new book out about it but it's hard to understand where any real new evidence is coming from.
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Granted it was a History channel documentary series, but the historians in the show were quite clear the he was basically hopped up on a cocktail of uppers (speed, meth, coke etc) and a variety of opioid based pain killers. This was purported to be a daily regimen and the only reason he was functioning at all. If true, he was a mess.
 
Rex Racer said:
From my perspective the 3 main issues that sunk Nazi Germany were in order;

Hitler's insistence on attacking the Russians before he had completely secured the western front.

Believing that he could win a war of attrition with his eastern neighbors, especially since he sent his boys in to Russia ill equipped for the weather they were about to encounter.

His fetish for Teutonic engineering. There was no reason for his war industry to waste their time and money manufacturing some of their war machines to the nth degree when the life expectancy of a tank was 3 weeks etc. Wasting their time and resources on futuristic weapons prototypes was a massive drag on the Nazi war machine as well.
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They should have never poked the Bear.
Germany just needed to secure Western Europe maintain control of North Africa and the Med. They would have starved out England into submission.
Hitler just wanted to fast track his desire to rule the world and it bit him in the butt.
 
GreenNickle said:
They should have never poked the Bear.
Germany just needed to secure Western Europe maintain control of North Africa and the Med. They would have starved out England into submission.
Hitler just wanted to fast track his desire to rule the world and it bit him in the butt.
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Agreed, taking on Russia year or 2 after he secured the western front (which he was well on his way to doing) would have been far less foolish. While it's very likely that he would have struggled to hold on against our manufacturing prowess once we got involved he made that a moot point by jumping the gun on the eastern front.
 
Rex Racer said:
Agreed, taking on Russia year or 2 after he secured the western front (which he was well on his way to doing) would have been far less foolish. While it's very likely that he would have struggled to hold on against our manufacturing prowess once we got involved he made that a moot point by jumping the gun on the eastern front.
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Only way a campaign into Russia was going to work would have been to have Japan focus on Russia as well instead of them poking Uncle Sam. Heck if they were smart they would have worked China into the mix. Japan hating the Chinese made that moot.
Russia wouldn't have been able to defeat Germany coming in from the left, Japan from the right and China right up the middle.
 
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