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"If you time-travel into the past and then try to kill Hitler, it won't work as intended. It may even backfire."
Rules of Time Travel

If you were given the power to travel through time and Set Right What Once Went Wrong, how would you improve the world? For many, the answer is obvious: kill Adolf Hitler. This would prevent the atrocities of World War II, The Holocaust, and their myriad side-effects... right?

Unfortunately, even in the land of fiction, this is not an easy task. For one, Hitler survived at least 42 real-life assassination attempts thanks to his various bodyguards, security forces, and a healthy dose of luck — maybe one of them was (or will have been) yours! Targeting him before his rise to power will often turn out to be ludicrously difficult as well — locating a lone, disillusioned war veteran wandering around post-WWI Europe is one hell of a needle-in-a-haystack search.

Secondly, even if you do manage to kill him, something as bad or worse might appear in his place: maybe an even worse dictator takes over and actually wins, or maybe the Soviet Union starts the war instead. Maybe Imperial Japan never gets in a war it can't win and manages to create its own lasting nightmarish superpower. Maybe if there was no horrific slaughter of "undesirables" that took place under Hitler's leadership, the rest of the world wouldn't have experienced the sort of collective shock upon discovery of the Holocaust that spurred them into beginning the process of purging racist and fascist elements from their own lands. Maybe Hitler's death will cause some kind of paradox, from retroactively erasing lives in the present to destroying the universe itself.

In short, it appears to be a cosmic law that something bad has to go down in the period of 1933-1945, and Hitler's premature death is either impossible or will make things worse. For narrative purposes, consider the Anthropic Principle: who would read a story in which someone tries to change history for the better, succeeds, and creates a stable utopian timeline that isn't infested with Clock Roaches? After they've killed off Hitler, what would the author do with the rest of the book?

Interestingly, it seems that neither FDR nor Churchill (or even Stalin while allied with them) have this immunity, because stories come up all the time about heroes having to stop a time-travelling neo-Nazi from sabotaging the Allies — villains simply wouldn't care about any of the possible consequences.

Compare Joker Immunity and Godwin's Law of Time Travel. This is a sub-trope of Precrime Arrest, which is about anyone being punished for something that the time traveler knows they will eventually do. This is one case where attempts to Prevent the War are ultimately counterproductive.

See the Analysis page for musings on how this trope might have worked in Real Life had Hitler actually died earlier. noreallife


Examples

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    Anime and Manga 
  • In the Devilman story "Late Spring in Vienna", Akira and Ryo end up in Austria in the 1920 to "kill a demon". A real one, turned into a Count. He has decided to buy a portrait of his wife Sophie, painted by a poor painter that has no choice - he would have preferred to keep it because he loves Sophie. A Jewish art dealer makes the arrangement, but the same evening Sophie dies, burnt by her demon husband. Akira and Ryo kill the lord demon and then come back to their time, hoping that history is in good shape after what they did. Then, back in the 20s, the painter is furious after Sophie's death, and places the blame on his dealer: "I hate you, I'll spend my entire life to destroy you and your whole race!" and the art dealer starts to run after him: "Hey, what are you saying? Where are you going like that? Adolf? Adolf Hitler!"
    • Made somewhat ironic by the fact that in real life, Hitler sucked at drawing people.
  • Subverted in Zipang. The hit is performed by someone of that time period acting on information from time travellers. An attempt was made by an IJN officer because he knows from the time-displaced crew of the Mirai, that the Axis would lose no matter what and of the sufferings of the Japanese people after the war. To prevent that, he tried to kill Hitler so the war would end quickly and Japan could get a peace treaty with good terms. He failed.
  • A fictional non-Hitler example of the same conundrum defines the last act of PandoraHearts. Oswald, an antagonist, wants to go back in time and prevent the Tragedy of Sablier, a cataclysmic event that occurred 100 years ago, almost destroyed the world, functionally annihilated Oswald's city, traumatized most of the cast, and whose consequences are nearing destroying the world again. However, the Tragedy was driven by underlying tensions and issues that had gone unaddressed until erupting into the open so violently, meaning that erasing the Tragedy wouldn't remove the problems that actually caused it, only the specific happenstance triggers that Oswald knows of from this particular timeline—and even if Oswald does succeed, he will be destroying the existence of every person who lived after the moment that he changed. The protagonists find this last part unacceptable, positioning that a solution for those in the present and the future is the only way to actually move forward in regards to these underlying problems—however difficult it is to live with, leaving the past to the past is the only way to move on from it.
  • In The World's Finest Assassin, Allen Smith is a skilled assassin who is killed by the organization he belonged to in a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness. His soul encounters a goddess who gives him the option of being reborn with no memories of his previous life, or he could be reborn into a medieval fantasy world while retaining his abilities and skills he acquired on Earth. The reason is that she needed him to assassinate a hero who would destroy the world after defeating the demon lord. He asks her if he could kill the hero earlier on if he was prepared enough for it, but she tells him no. She says that only the hero can defeat the demon lord, and if he dies before that happens, then the demon lord would become unstoppable, destroying that world, or at least enslaving it. When he tries a Take a Third Option of saving the hero instead, she says it's possible, but would be less likely to succeed than to just simply assassinate them.

    Comic Books 
  • Perhaps the ultimate comic book subversion of this trope is the short story "Killing Time", written by Gerry Conway, illustrated by Tom Yeates, and published in the DC Comics science fiction anthology series Mystery In Space issue #114, December, 1980. An idealistic time traveller assassinates Hitler with a laser rifle at a Nazi rally in 1938, but is then lynched by the enraged crowd. Hitler's generals find the laser rifle, eventually learn how to duplicate it, and conquer the world. Decades in the dystopian, Nazi future, an idealistic time traveller sets off to kill the first time traveller to prevent Nazi victory. In the utopian future of that outcome, a die-hard Nazi time traveller sets off to kill the second time traveller to ensure a Nazi victory, and on and on and on. The story ends with an image of an infinite series of rifle scopes trained upon an infinite number of backs.
  • Parodied to the point of self-awareness in an issue of Deadpool, where Hitler is getting used to beating down time travellers - and then he decides to hijack one's time-travelling device and go after Nick Fury. He is killed outside his timeline by Fury, Deadpool and Cable, but the (extremely bullet-riddled) body is brought back to 1945 to keep history flowing.
  • The Hitler thing was mentioned in a time travel arc of a Godzilla comic book. However, when the villain used his time machine to put Godzilla into the Titanic iceberg, the Big G's escape not only caused the famous collision, but the use of his nuclear breath warmed up the water, increasing the number of survivors.
  • X-Men:
    • Someone makes the mistake of mentioning this idea to Magneto — who is a Holocaust survivor. Predictably, he explodes. In the movie it was the anxiety of separation from his mother in the camps that first revealed the powers of the Master of Magnetism. Without such violent circumstances, Magneto would be a very different person.
    • The mini-series True Friends has Kitty Pryde and Rachel Summers accidentally travelling to the late 1930s. Kitty, who is Jewish and learned about the Holocaust from her grandfather, himself a camp survivor, decides to assassinate Hitler and most of his staff, until she is forced to choose between changing history and saving Rachel from the Shadow King.
  • Fantastic Four:
    • In a comic book from the John Byrne era, the Invisible Woman, the Torch and She-Hulk find themselves in 1930s New York with Nick Fury. Fury decides to go to Germany and kill Hitler, and the other three try to stop him. They find Fury being interrogated by some goons while Hitler watches; they overpower the goons and free Fury, and Sue Storm gives an impassioned speech about not altering the timeline. Fury nods, starts walking out the door — and then turns and shoots Hitler. It turns out that it was All Just a Dream.
    • In a storyline where a future Dr. Doom comes back to kill Reed, it is stated that timelines tend to correct themselves. For example, if you prevent Abraham Lincoln's assassination, people remember the time he was almost killed in the theatre - a couple of days before dying in a bathtub slip. Of course, stuff like that is Depending on the Writer - the Marvel multiverse is said to exist partly because time travel almost always changes things... but simply creates an alternate timeline. So for the above example, there would be a universe where Lincoln was killed in the theatre, and one where he wasn't. And probably at least one where he slipped on the soap, but not because of any universal correction as The Multiverse.
  • In the first story arc of Midnighter's solo series, he is sent back in time to kill Hitler in the trenches of World War One, only to be stopped by the Time Police. In the penultimate chapter, Midnighter actually gets his chance to make the hit — on the night Hitler would commit suicide. Cue epiphany:
    Midnighter: ...it was just this pathetic little man going off to meet his ultimately quite mundane fate...
    Timecop: It's always some pathetic little man. I seen ninety percent of the greatest scumbags in history up close, an' I can tell you: Khan, Pol Pot, Caligula, Torquemada, whoever, you look at any one of these worms an' you wonder how people didn't spot 'em a mile off. But they always end up on top anyhow, somehow...
    Midnighter: Because people want them there. Adolf got elected, let's not forget.
    Timecop: True, Dave. People suck. The past sucks. But that ain't no excuse for not trynna change the future.
    • In their downtime, The Authority likes to go to alternate universes and kill their Hitlers.
  • In All-Star Squadron #2, Per Degaton noted that he could not time travel to the date of Pearl Harbor due to "interference" in the time stream. (The same writer, Roy Thomas, also had Rama-Tut experience timestream static. Perhaps the presence of so many people attempting to time travel to a certain point creates congestion, similar to many people attempt to use the same exit from a road.)
  • In one classic Strontium Dog prog, Johnny Alpha and Wulf travel back in time to arrest Hitler and put him on trial before the Court of Ultimate Retribution. They have to pick him up moments before his suicide however, otherwise there would be nothing to try him for.
  • The appropriately named graphic novel I Killed Adolf Hitler both subverts and invokes this trope as the center to its entire plot. A down-on-his-luck hitman is hired to go back in time and kill Adolf, using a time machine that is only good for one round trip. Only he bungles the job, and Hitler steals the time machine and escapes to the present. With no way back home, he's forced to live through the intervening years the normal way, waiting for the day the time machine arrives so he can stop Hitler.
    • During a twist of events, he loses track of Hitler in the modern day, and another fifty years have to pass before his girlfriend finally solves the plot by travelling back in time - finally killing Hitler. It is complicated.
  • In one issue of Booster Gold, Booster off-handedly asks if this mission is stopping another time traveling Hitler assassin.
  • The Superman storyline Time and Time Again brings this up in a follow-up issue when the time-observing Linear Men talk with Superman about their policy of preventing changes to history by citing Hitler as an example; they could go back and ensure that he died in the First World War, but they can't be sure that the new timeline would be better or worse than the original. Superman concedes to their point, recalling how he avoided changing history during his own recent trip back to the Second World War.
  • This trope is inverted but nonetheless explored in the Dallas arc of The Umbrella Academy, when it is learned that saving JFK from being assassinated would result in world-wide destruction via nuclear war.
  • Averted in the second issue of Paperinik New Adventures: the villain builds a machine that specifically avoids this and the Butterfly of Doom effect. Though he only gets a single shot at this, and botches it thanks to PK's intervention.
  • One 2000 AD Time Twisters (Basically a Future Shock involving time travel) had Allied assassins go back to Hitler's birth to assassinate him. Hitler uses Mental Time Travel to take control of his own infant self and kill the assassins, saving his own life in several different alternate realities. However, it comes back to bite him in the ass when his baby self's personality takes him over, leading him to make increasingly idiotic decisions and leads to his eventual suicide.
  • Averted in Multiverse, a graphic novel written by Michael Moorcock for Vertigo Comics. In one plot thread featuring Seaton Begg, the Meta-Temporal Detective, the time-traveling detective investigates the murder of Hitler's niece, who turned out to be his mistress as well. By the end of that arc, Begg did not actually kill Hitler, but his investigation did result in Hitler being arrested, and the Nazis discredited to the point where they would never rise to power in Begg's timeline. The consequences are never dealt with, as Begg moves on to his next adventure.
  • Late in the series Lilith the protagonist travels to the 1930s and, given her completely uncaring attitude about changing the timeline as long as she completes her mission and her strong morals the readers just know she'll go after him, the only question being if she'll succeed or not... Except the previous changes to the timeline have prevented World War I from starting just yet, so Hitler has done nothing to get Lilith after him and isn't even part of Germany's leadership or mentioned at all.
  • In Harley's Little Black Book, Harley Quinn has lots of fun beating up Hitler to a bloody pulp, all the while giving him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, as a result of which his car crashes, and yet somehow he survives. Later, though, this is subverted as Harley is so annoying that she drives Hitler to shoot himself. This is likely a Stable Time Loop, though.
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Brainstorm spent several million years building a time-machine so he could go back and stop Megatron being created (partly to save a guy he had a crush on). Once he gets there, he hesitates, not just because preventing the war might stop him being created. Then Rewind kills the not-yet activated Megatron anyway, since the shenanigans have given him a glimpse of an alternate timeline where this played out, and things suck for Cybertron, which is under the genocidal rule of the Functionist Council, but it's great for everyone else, since the Decepticons never formed, never took their show on the road, and never torched entire planets in the name of expansion. Whirl then implants a Spark Brainstorm had on him in Megatron's body, out of spite for the Functionists. A later story arc then shows that in the alternate timeline the Functionists also decided to go around killing other species in the name of religious fundamentalism.
  • In The Flash (Infinite Frontier), Wally West ends up in the body of the Golden Age Flash and discovers that Adolf Hitler is not only in possession of the Spear of Destiny, but also hopped up on Speed Force energy. Wally suggests just shooting Hitler, but Barry Allen and Mr. Terrific shoot that down, noting that doing so would cause an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Hitler does explode due to the Speed Force energy being released normally and the Golden Age Flash, now in possession of his body again, and the Golden Age Ray have no idea if he survived that.
  • Discussed in Days Missing, a comic about a cosmic being called the Steward who averts extinction-level disasters. Over the course of the series he prevents such potential Apocalypse Hows as Grey Goo, a 95% lethal airborne mutant form of Ebola and the Large Hardon Collider creating an Unrealistic Black Hole. We also see him in the past doing such things as ensuring some of the Library of Alexandria survives and early Chinese civilization isn't wiped out by steppes raiders. Real-world catastrophes of the Modern period aren't really mentioned until near the end of the series, where it's revealed that the comic takes place in an Alternate Timeline where World War II never happened, as the Steward foresaw Hitler's rise to power and prevented it by teaching him to paint like the greatest artists in history so he never got into politics.
  • In the Vertigo anthology one-shot Time Warp, the final story "The Principle" focuses on two time-travelers who work to prevent Hitler being assassinated by other time-travelers, noting that they detest having to keep people from killing Hitler, but know that it's important to prevent history from being mucked up.
  • In the 11th issue of Squadron Supreme (2015), Spider-Man finds out that the Squadron need Reed Richards' time machine for their goals and asks what they intend to use the time machine to accomplish.
    Spider-Man: If you're planning to assassinate Hitler, it won't work — Don't you watch Twilight Zone reruns when they're on?

    Comic Strips 
  • Played for Laughs in a Tom the Dancing Bug Super-Fun-Pak comic, "Tim Tripp, Time Traveller". Tripp appears from the past, reporting that he successfully killed Krauss in 1932 Germany, preventing him from starting WWII. The person he's talking to asks if he means Hitler, causing Tripp to sigh and head back in time for the 8th time, wondering how many of these guys he has to kill.
    • In another, the idiot time traveller Percial Dunwoody convinces Hitler to go into art instead of politics. The result is that Hitler's landscape paintings inspired a genocide in Europe.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animated 
  • Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox: In his Break Them by Talking speech to the Flash, Professor Zoom notes that instead of killing Hitler, as is typical of this trope, Flash could have used his powers of time travel (which he achieved by running so fast that he could go backward in time) to "Stop Kennedy from being assassinated or making sure Hitler stays in art school. But no, you had to go save mommy".

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Timecop: The man addressing the Senate committee gives killing Hitler as an example of why the unpredictable nature of time travel means it has to be policed.
  • Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision: In the opening the protagonist has to stop the Well-Intentioned Extremist villain from assassinating Hitler at a concert precisely because of the possibility of unforeseen consequences.
  • Hitler himself is a result of the time travel exemption in the Australian film As Time Goes By:
    Mike: But you've got a time machine—you could stop it.
    Joe Bogart: Couldn't stop the Holocaust—got rid of Strasser, and this dumb painter named Adolf showed up and did it all exactly the same way. Who'd'a read about it?
  • Discussed in David Cronenberg's movie version of The Dead Zone, when Johnny is debating assassinating a politician that he knows is going to start World War III, and asks for advice from his friend Dr. Weizak (a Holocaust survivor).
    Johnny: If you could travel back in time, say, to Germany, before Hitler came to power, what would you do? Would you kill him?
    Weizak: Johnny, you must know that... I love people. And as a doctor, I am expected to save lives. So naturally, I would have no choice... but to kill the son of a bitch. (raises his drink) Do svidaniya.
  • In Looper, Old Joe travels back in time to kill a genocidal, telekinetic crime lord called the Rainmaker as a child, only for Joe to realize that Old Joe's attempt would ultimately fail, and as a direct result cause the child to grow up evil and become the Rainmaker.
  • In Memoirs of an Invisible Man, the Big Bad tells Nick, while trying to convince him to turn to his side, what the U.S. government could have done if they'd had an invisible agent during World War II. Nick guesses he means "assassinate Hitler", and has more sense - he think's the guy's crazy.
  • Discussed in Flight 1942, when a modern-day plane accidentally travels back to 1940. Once the passengers have learned what has happened, one proposes that they use their knowledge of the future to try and kill Hitler, particularly since another pair of passengers are historians with expertise of this era, but other passengers shoot that down. While the original passenger protests that they can use their knowledge of the future to take Hitler by surprise, others point out he isn't trained for this kind of thing, and a soldier on the flight explicitly states that it would only take one mistake on the passenger's part for Hitler to get access to the future knowledge they're trying to exploit in the first place.
  • In About Time Tim's dad explains that since it's Mental Time Travel, Tim can't change events from before he was born, and names killing Hitler as an example.
  • The Terminator films after the second (plus Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) shows that trying to prevent Skynet from existing will never work - after all, the time-travelling killer robots must come from somewhere. Terminator: Dark Fate takes one step further by going the "kill Hitler and someone similar takes its place" route with both Skynet and John Connor.
  • In Project Almanac, the group ponders about going back in time to kill Hitler, but Adam quickly shoots down the idea by pointing out that none of them can speak German and the time machine can't send them back that far in time.
  • Zig-zagged in Deadpool 2:
    • Originally the film included a scene where Deadpool used his Time Travel device to kill Baby Hitler in his crib. Subverted.
    • Except the Test Audience found Baby Hitler too cute and the scene was cut from the theatrical release. Played straight.
    • Super-Duper Cut on Blu-Ray restored the Deleted Scene and showed Deadpool about to do the deed. Subverted.
    • Except it also added The Stinger revealing that even Deadpool can't bring himself to do it. Played straighter.
    • But Deadpool also suggests bringing in Cable, who "loves killing kids". Subverted?
  • Avengers: Endgame: Gets referenced when the possibility of time travel is brought up.
    Rhodey: If we can do this - y'know, go back in time - why don't we just find baby Thanos, y'know, and... [makes a gesture of strangling a baby with a rope, complete with "choking sound"]
    Banner: [shocked] First of all, that's horrible...
    Rhodey: It's Thanos!
    Banner: ...And secondly, time doesn't work that way!
  • In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the titular Dial, Archimedes' Antikythera Mechanism, is an ancient artifact that can take anyone through a time fissure and with the right calculations, could send anyone back in time and alter history. Naturally, someone wants to use it to go back to 1939 and kill Hitler before he can invade Poland, but the twist in the plot is that it's the surviving Nazis, led by Jürgen Voller, who want to kill Hitler because they blame him for Nazi Germany losing World War II, and seek to replace him with a more competent Führer. Luckily, it turns out that the Dial of Destiny is fixed to send time travelers to 212-213 BC, during the Siege of Syracuse, and operates on a Stable Time Loop, meaning that Voller's plan was doomed from the start.

    Literature 
  • The Ur-Example was published in 1941 when Roger Sherman Hoar (under the Pen Name Ralph Milne Farley) published his short story "I Killed Hitler" in Weird Tales in which a distant cousin of Hitler travels back in time and succeeds, only to find that history deals with it by forcing him to replace Hitler and play history out as it originally happened.
  • Darren Shan's Cirque Du Freak saga plays with this idea in conversation in Sons Of Destiny. As the main character, Darren, speaks to Evanna, they converse about the time travelling powers of Mr. Tiny. Evanna says that the events of history are pre-written, only the characters can change. Darren brings up Hitler, to which Evanna says that if he was killed off some other person would replace him, keeping the main events of history in check.
  • This idea is expanded with a narrative Take That! in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies: 'Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot him and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?'
    • Also Discussed In-Universe in Johnny and the Bomb. The protagonists talk about travelling back in time and killing Hitler, thereby averting World War 2, but The Smart Guy points out that killing Hitler wouldn't erase the conditions that led to Hitler, and someone else would likely rise up in the same way Hitler did.
  • In The Complete Time Traveler: A Tourist's Guide to the Fourth Dimension, a fictional "documentational" book for time travelers, a scenario is mentioned where someone assassinates Hitler while he is still a young artist. The assassin never returns — in this version of Time Travel, dramatically altering history creates a parallel universe, and he returned to his present day in that universe instead of "ours".
  • In Stephen Fry's 1997 novel Making History, Hitler's parents are prevented from conceiving, but his absence allows the taller, more handsome, cleverer Rudolf Gloder to ride the tide of frustration that gave birth to the Nazi party, and the results of his reign are worse for the world than Hitler's. Gloder has negotiated a stop to the war with Germany still in control of most of its conquests, and has reined in the anti-Semitism to the point that it hasn't inspired total war from his adversaries. This example is even more impressive when you consider that the entirety of Fry's mother's family (aside from her parents) were killed in Auschwitz. On top of that, Fry is also gay.
  • In the Alternate History novels of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191, the Confederates win the War of Secession and a subsequent war with the Union, the United States allies with Germany to win World War One, so World War Two features a fascist France and CSA against the USA and a Kaiser-ruled Germany. The Confederacy is led by Hitler-analog Jake Featherston and his ultranationalist "Freedom Party," complete with a genocidal campaign against Confederate blacks, but we also meet the actual Hitler, a German Army sergeant seething with hate but languishing in obscurity.
  • In Alastair Reynolds' novel Century Rain, World War II is, in fact averted (although not by killing Hitler, he lives till old age) but the result is a negative one, as it effectively halts the progress of science and technology at pre-1940s levels. 'course, it happens in a separate world, not our world, created as some kind of museum to protect human past. And technology may have been artificially halted to prevent rockets from banging on the roof. Effective. Most great leaps in technology pre-Internet was done in, or for, war.
  • A passing mention of this is made in Robert A. Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The plot involves an agency that can travel through time and across parallel universes. One of their early attempts at improving the world involved assassinating (humanely, they simply ensured that his parents were using birth control on the day of his conception) a Hitler-like dictator. His brutal reign doesn't happen, but what was originally a small-scale nuclear war turned into a global one, since the Hitler-analogue had kept the alternate America out of the war. They rid the world of the evil dictatorship, sure, but they also rid it of all life other than cockroaches. Unusually for this trope, they didn't take their failure as a sign that there are things they shouldn't be messing with; instead, they decided they needed better projections about what would happen should they make a change.
    • Another Heinlein passing comment is that eliminating Hitler was what led to Nehemiah Scudder's fundamentalist theocracy in the USA.
  • Alfred Bester's short story "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" also displays a similar paradox. The story involves a professor burning with rage over his wife's affair, who decides to eliminate the other man. He does this by first killing the man's father before he was born, to no effect, he then goes and kills his grandfather. Again nothing. Soon, he's gone on a killing spree against many key figures in history, all in the hopes that one of them would end the existence of his wife's lover. He discovers that no matter how much he changes history, it all continues to make no change in the present. All he succeeds in doing is erasing himself from history.
  • The Iron Dream is a rather unusual example set in an Alternate History where Hitler emigrated to the US after World War I to become a Sci-Fi/fantasy author. In this world, the Soviet Union conquers all of Eurasia and Africa, but this is all background material - Spinrad instead uses Hitler's book-within-the-book The Lord of the Swastika to point out the Unfortunate Implications of Golden Age militaristic SF.
  • In the novel Days Of Cain by J. R. Dunn, the Moiety is an history-monitoring agency run by mysterious hyper-evolved humans from the end of time, whose directive is that history must remain absolutely untouched so they can study it (in this sense, it's the opposite of the agency in Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity, who constantly tinker with history in order to improve it). The novel centers around a search for rogue agents who are trying to stop the Holocaust (which must be preserved to maintain historical integrity). Interestingly, it's revealed that the other customary linch-pin of history, the John F. Kennedy assassination (as well as the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne), were the Moiety's attempt to stop the Kennedys' rise to power (which was not supposed to happen and was the doing of another rogue agent).
  • Orson Scott Card's book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is probably the epitome of both playing this trope straight and averting it. The protagonists learn that the voyages of Columbus are the result of interference from time travelers in an alternate future. They speculate that the rising American empires were on the verge of developing technologies that would have allowed them to travel to and ultimately conquer Europe, and sent Columbus to stop them. Unfortunately, that resulted in the near-total destruction of the population of the Americas, and set the world on a path that eventually resulted in irreversible ecological collapse. They end up planning another intervention in the past, with the hope of Europe and America finally meeting on a non-genocidal basis. The coda of the novel suggests that they were entirely successful.
  • In the two-part alternate history novels Fox On The Rhine and Fox At The Front, Operation Valkyrie works because of a sneeze. Hitler dies, and guess what happens? The above described situation with Himmler takes place almost exactly as described. Though, things do end up seemingly better than in real life, as everyone's favorite Magnificent Bastard Rommel ends up being The Hero, and Himmler ends up dying in a much worse way than Hitler. Oh yeah, and America gets to throw their first nuke at the Soviets instead of Japan.
  • John Scalzi's short story, "Missives From Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results," gives eight possible scenarios resulting from Hitler being killed on August 13, 1908, in Vienna, Austria, each more unlikely (and more hilarious) than the last.
  • One of the main characters in Sergey Lukyanenko's novel Dances on the Snow (a part of the Genome trilogy) mentions that simulations were done on what would happen if certain key historical figures were to be eliminated before they did what they did. The result was that no single person, even Hitler or Stalin, are important enough in the grand scheme of things to significantly alter the chain of events that resulted in the world history. It should be noted that no time travel technology exists in the novel, this was purely a simulation.
  • In Li Harbin's Time Ghost series, killing Hitler has apparently gone wrong so many times that all time travel units have blocks on traveling to any time in which the man was alive, because the consequences are dire. This becomes a plot point when one Time Spy decides to prevent World War One instead, thinking it would change things so that World War Two didn't happen, which via chain reaction would mean that World War Three (which nearly wiped humanity out entirely) wouldn't happen. The resulting clusterfuck takes up the bulk of Time Ghost's main plot as this goes very, very, very wrong.
  • Connie Willis's time-travelling historians can't go back to any event which is over a certain threshold of "significance" to world history. "The net" (the name for their time machine) won't open for them, or if it will, results are unpredictable. In-universe, someone did once try to go to Germany to kill Hitler in the early days of the net and ended up in South America. Similarly, you can't go to Waterloo or Lincoln's assassination. Since historians can be in the past for extended periods and travel freely once there, it's never explained why you can't go to a different location a bit earlier and travel to the site of the event you're interested in (perhaps the net somehow knows what you're up to?) but then it's never really explained why it's lethal to exist in the same time period twice, either.
    • It's said in Doomsday Book that the time traveller arrives at a nearby point in spacetime such that she cannot change history. (In that novel she aimed for England 1328 and landed in 1348; she doesn't change history because everyone she meets dies.) The story we read may be the result of a series of loops converging on stability.
    • In All Clear there's a strong implication that at least sometimes the net puts you somewhere unexpected in order for you to play a part you already played, leading to a Stable Time Loop. The slippage is to protect history, but nobody ever thought that it might work by ensuring you were in the place you were supposed to be. So you still can't go and kill Hitler, because your own history says you didn't.
  • In Robert Asprin's Time Scout series, people important to history can't be killed. Period. There's no real explanation, but you'll trip, or sneeze, or die, or your gun will jam, or something, but you will fail. Essentially, in-universe Plot Armor.
    • The explanation is that when you're in the past, you don't change history, you merely fulfill your already-taken-place-just-hasn't-happened-to-you-yet part in it. So while you can mess about fairly freely in 'the shadows of history', you can't possibly change the way any event was recorded, because history already records that you clearly failed to change it. One villain's cover story involves him discovering an ancient photograph of himself doing something he has not yet done (it's a lie, but the story is accepted as perfectly legitimate effect of the time travel rules).
  • Inverted in Stephen King's 11/22/63 where, instead of going back in time to assassinate someone, the main character instead goes back in time to prevent an assassination, specifically that of JFK. He learns the hard way that the trope goes both ways; not only did preventing the assassination actually make things worse (for one thing, the Civil Rights movement never happened, about half of the world is rendered uninhabitable thanks to nuclear warfare, and Maine seceded to Canada), but it turns out that making drastic changes to history can destroy time itself.
  • Inverted and somewhat averted in Stanley Shapiro's A Time To Remember. The narrator travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination, fails, and is himself arrested as the assassin. His girlfriend then goes back, fails to prevent the shooting, but does prevent the hero's arrest. Finally the elderly genius who invented the machine determines to set things right by traveling back himself and shooting Oswald on Nov. 21. An aversion in that the US pulls its military advisors out of Vietnam, and as a result the world basically relaxes out of the Cold War. On the other hand, we only get to see what happened for a few months thereafter; in a Bittersweet Ending, by traveling back to a time when they themselves were already alive, the protagonists violated the law that something cannot co-exist with itself in the same space/time, and thus sacrificed their own younger selves — and cannot return to their original present.
  • Animorphs plays with this in Megamorphs 3: Elfangor's Secret, but ultimately averts it, because by the time they get to World War 2, history is already so screwed up that killing Hitler won't matter — he's just a jeep driver in that world. So when Tobias wants to kill him, while Cassie doesn't see how they can kill Hitler in this world just because he's Hitler, given that he didn't do any of the things he did in the regular world. But Tobias "accidentally" kills him a few minutes later.
  • Desmond Warzel's short story "Wikihistory":
    • It's basically a time traveler's message board discussion about the importance of not killing Hitler: it turns out World War II and the Third Reich are vitally important to the invention of time travel and the foundation of the Time Police. Noobs who didn't read the rules keep going back in time to kill Hitler anyway, and an increasingly angry moderator has to clean up after them.
      BigChill:Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.
      SilverFox316: Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?
    • Another poster calls the others out on their Eurocentrism and asks why no one ever tries to kill other, arguably worse tyrants and murderers. He goes after one of them, successfully kills him, and inadvertently RetGones himself. No one seems particularly inclined to undo his error.
  • Abney Park came out with a novelization of their band's fictional backstory. In it, they subvert the trope by kidnapping baby Hitler and raising him aboard an airship full of pirates. This causes Twentieth-Century civilisation to fail to recognise the dangers of having such an arch-villain when they see it, allowing one to take over the world, along with one of the crew stealing the airships' time-travel technology, giving said villain the willingness and tools to do so. He imprisons all of humanity that he can grab into three walled cities, keeps them in a state of technological regression, enjoys the best for himself, of course, and renders the rest a wasteland he thinks of as Natures' inalienable right, even though he's really just slapped together an improbable ecosystem out of whatever creatures he thinks are most awesome, in the manner of a seven-year-olds' action figure collection, leaving anyone who dares live outside his cities stuck in a Dungeons and Dragons monster manual.
  • Spoofed in one sketch in Free Range Chickens, in which a time traveler succeeds in murdering baby Hitler and then finds himself unable to explain to a horrified onlooker why he did it. "Officer? This man just killed a baby".
  • Complete World Knowledge turns out to be an aversion. Throughout the first two books, the consistency of the made-up nonsense gradually forms a sort of Alternate History, and by the third book, we learn that Hitler drowned at a seaside resort during the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt was nearby, and he did nothing.
    Why? What happened in your timeline?
  • Averted, with a catch, in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. Ursula lives her life over and over, and as she becomes more aware of past lives, she realizes she has a unique opportunity to kill Hitler before WWII. In at least two lives, it seems she does so. However, this results in her instantly being killed, so she can't "enjoy" the altered timeline.
  • Timewyrm: Exodus from the Virgin New Adventures has the Doctor prevent Ace killing Hitler, telling her that if Hitler dies a competent madman could lead Germany.
  • Played with in Dean Koontz's Lightning. First, time travel is invented by the Nazis, and of course they're not going to kill their boss. Second, the rules of time travel prevent traveling to the past, making it impossible to go back and kill him before the war. Third, one of the Nazis does have a Heel–Face Turn and uses the time-travel device as essentially a teleporter to jump into Hitler's bunker. He points out that he could kill him but he's not going to, in order to demonstrate his loyalty. At this point he's already sabotaged the time-travel program and guaranteed the outcome of the war that we all know, so there's no need for him to kill Hitler right then anyway.
  • The Primal Solution, a novella by Eric Norden. The central character somehow takes over the body of a young Hitler. After tormenting him for a while, the protagonist prepares to force Hitler to commit suicide. However, Hitler reasserts control just before throwing himself into the river. In shock over the whole experience, he wonders why the protagonist, who had identified himself as Jewish, did these horrible things to him. In a combination with the Butterfly of Doom, the protagonist realizes that he had possessed Hitler before he had acquired any anti-Semitic feelings, and his possession caused those feelings. His attempt to prevent the Holocaust directly caused it.
  • Partly averted in "It's OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler," by Jo Lindsay Walton. A group of time-travelers discover that their intervention has been reverted by a rival group. They start to plot their response, and by the end, begin to question whether or not they have become the true Baby Hitlers.
  • Played with in All Our Yesterdays. Every attempt to stop James from building the time machine or otherwise sabotaging it has been met with failure, leading to death as the only option... but Em can't bring herself to do it and James ends up killing himself to stop it all.
  • "The Einstein Gun" is set in a world where Franz Ferdinand is never assassinated, because Gavrilo Princip's gun jams. World War I never happens, the old continental empires stand, Communism remains a mere fringe political theory, the USA stays isolationist and France becomes the West's beacon of democracy and freedom. Hitler remains in Vienna, where he founds an equivalent to the Nazi Party and becomes Chancellor of Austria, where he institutes the same antisemitic and anti-Slav agenda as in reality, with the explicit support of Emperor Franz Ferdinand. The story ends with the Jewish-Austrian narrator and Albert Einstein using an experimental time machine to send the eponymous gun back in time to the day of the assassination, hoping Ferdinand's death will derail Hitler's rise to power. Oops.
  • The Greg Egan short story "Oracle" plays straight and discusses this trope. An infinite number of Alternate Timelines exists in a five-dimensional field of "Everett branches", wherein Dimensional Travelers are unable to alter their own past but can interfere with other branches as they like. Since all known time travelers come from branches that suffered World War II, they can't change the path of the war, but are limited to minor interventions like redirecting the occasional bomb, which don't derail their personal histories.
  • In Born A Crime, Trevor Noah discusses and deconstructs the motive for this trope, arguing that Hitler's atrocities are not that different from the European imperialism and colonialism inflicted on much of the world, particularly Africa. Westerners only consider Hitler to be the worst historical monster, because he inflicted atrocities on them and because the Nazis kept such meticulous records of their atrocities.
    Noah: If black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson. ... So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strongman from the history books.note 
  • In the third book of The Dire Saga, Dire learns that when Timetripper first got his powers, he attempted to kill Hitler repeatedly, only to find that time keeps correcting itself when it happens. Hitler has, as a result, become extremely paranoid and canny about attacks. It's also resulted in a "groove" in time such that Timetripper keeps getting pulled back to that time period, and the death of Hitler is the easiest way to "reset" his powers.
  • The Supervillainy Saga: In one tie-in short story, Gary mentions that he went back in time to kill Hitler multiple times at various points in history. This just sprouted alternate timelines in which Nazism still arose without Hitler and the Nazis won the war without having to deal with his inept leadership, only for their Facist But Inefficient government to fall apart in a few decades anyway.
  • In Elaine Midcoh's A Trickle In History, the protagonist learns that it's impossible to go back and assassinate Hitler — whenever someone tries, a weird coincidence happens and Hitler survives. The protagonist discovers, however, that she can go back in time and bribe an art school dean into accepting Hitler as one of his school's students, and thus avert the Holocaust that way.

    Live-Action TV 
  • El Chapulín Colorado has an episode where Chapulin goes up against Hitler himself. It ends up being an aversion when one of Hitler's bumbling lieutenants pulls down a switch that blows up their headquarters, with all of them inside.
    Chapulin: And then history will say that he commited suicide, that the Allies bombarded the place... anyway.
  • Danger 5 go back in time and not only fail to kill Hitler, they create a Bad Future where he's taken over the world! Of course Hitler coming Back from the Dead is a Running Gag in the series, so this is no surprise. What do you expect from a series about Those Wacky Nazis trying to Take Over the World...in The '60s?
  • Brought up numerous times in Doctor Who, especially the Expanded Universe.
    • In one of the novels, the Doctor helps Hitler to prevent other aliens from making things worse. Another criticised the whole "kill Hitler before the War" theory as a hypocritical exercise in futility, since the only person who would ultimately be able to kill Hitler before he'd done anything to merit death (as a baby) would be someone who could willingly murder an innocent (a.k.a. another Hitler).
    • Doctor Who has always used the Daleks as a metaphor for the Nazis, so the following exchange from "Genesis of the Daleks" is about as close to this trope as we're going to get:
      The Doctor: Just touch these two strands together and the Daleks are finished... Have I that right?
      Sarah Jane: To destroy the Daleks? You can't doubt it.
      The Doctor: But I do! You see, some things could be better with the Daleks. Many future worlds will become allies just because of their fear of the Daleks... But the final responsibility is mine, and mine alone. Listen: if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you, and told you that the child would grow up to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?
      Sarah Jane: We're talking about the Daleks, the most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them! You must complete your mission for the Time Lords.
      The Doctor: Do I have the right?
    • Played for Laughs in "Let's Kill Hitler", when the Doctor gets forced at gunpoint by Amy's friend Mels to go back in time to kill Hitler. Meanwhile, the crew of the Teselecta, a time-traveling infiltrator robot crewed by miniature humans who punish Karma Houdinis, tries to punish Hitler in 1938, only to realize they've come too early (they normally abduct them just before their deaths). Before they can rectify their mistake, the TARDIS comes crashing through the window, saving Hitler's life. Hitler takes the opportunity to shoot the robot, hitting Mels instead. Rory then punches Hitler in the face and locks him in a cupboard, and he is never heard from again that episode while the true plot starts, with Mels regenerating and revealed to be River Song.
      Hitler: Thank you, whoever you are. I think you have just saved my life.
      The Doctor: Believe me, it was an accident.
      Amy: What do you mean, we just saved his life? We cannot have just SAVED HITLER!
      • "Shut up, Hitler!"
        Rory: Is anyone else having trouble dealing with today? I'm getting this sort of banging in my head.
        Amy: Yeah, I think that's Hitler in the cupboard.
        Rory: That's not helping.
    • Discussed Trope in "Kill the Moon". The Doctor mentions taking Clara out to dinner in Berlin in 1938, and that they didn't kill Hitler while they were there, to prove a point that certain points in history are just too monumental for him to dare interfere in them.
    • Not played for laughs in "The Magician's Apprentice", when Twelve meets a young Davros, creator of the Daleks, on Skaro. Davros later reminds the Doctor of his choice to abandon Davros by replaying Four's speech from above.
  • In The Drew Carey Show, Drew contemplates whether it would be moral to kill Hitler, and concludes he couldn't because then there would be no A & E.
    • But then he revises his opinion because he'd be on that channel all the time as the guy who killed Hitler, yeah!
  • Parodied in the Israeli sketch comedy series The Jews Are Coming: Hitler's very first memory is of a bunch of people popping out of time machines to try and kill him.
    "But I was such a cute baby…"
  • In the season five premiere of Lost, Pierre Chang explains to a foreman that the unlimited energy source beneath the Orchid greenhouse can be used to manipulate time. The incredulous foreman replies "What, we're gonna go back and kill Hitler?" to which Chang replies "Don't be absurd! There are rules! Rules that can't be broken!"
    • This exchange actually foreshadows an important event later in the season. Sayid, having unwittingly gone back in time to the days of the Dharma Initiative, tries to kill Ben as a child, knowing that he will basically grow up to cause much death and suffering, essentially becoming the "Hitler" of the island. It doesn't work, and it's hinted that Sayid's actions might have even been what pushed Ben over to the dark side in the first place.
  • In The Magicians, a group of students from the 70s or earlier wrote a thesis on going back in time to kill Hitler, even building a time machine to World War II. They failed to account for the fact that Hitler was a skilled combat magician and were killed.
  • In series 3 of Misfits an old Jewish man who's bought Curtis' power attempts to travel in time and kill Hitler. Not only does he fail, he accidentally drops his cellphone, which Hitler finds and uses to advance Nazi technology by decades. When the guy gets back to 2011, he finds a world where Germany won the war and now rules Britain. So Kelly gets given the time-travel power and uses it to go back and take the phone off Hitler. And then chin him. And ask him why he's "such a fookin' dick". And then "kick the shit out of him".
  • Red Dwarf. Hitler is saved from successful assassination when Lister steals his suitcase (with a bomb inside) during one time travel (where he uses "evolved" film developer).
    • A similar situation occurs in the episode "Tikka to Ride", but with JFK. Listers travels back in time to stock up on curry and inadvertently prevents the assassination of JFK. This leads to Kennedy getting impeached and sent to prison and a second Cuban Missile Crisis. The team solves the problem by abducting JFK while he's being transferred to prison and traveling back to 1963 where Kennedy himself becomes the second gunman from the Grassy Knoll.
    • A tie-in book has a Space Corps psychological test which includes the question "If you could go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby, would you?", to which Lister answers "No, because as a baby, I wouldn't be tall enough to reach him".
  • A non-time-travel example appears in Sanctuary. It is revealed that Druitt has killed Hitler months before D-Day, but the German high command has been using Body Doubles to make it appear that he's still alive. In fact, they are glad Hitler's gone. Druitt realizes that Germany can't be brought down simply by killing one man. Interestingly, in the pilot episode, Helen claims that Druitt is a time traveler from the future, which would make this trope true, if his backstory wasn't RetConned later into a Victorian scientist who became a teleporter after injecting vampire blood.
  • In one rather heavy-handed episode of Sliders, it was discovered that a world in which California was essentially a Nazi state, complete with the ethnic cleansing of minorities, had never had a Hitler (as per one character's befuddled reaction when Hitler's name is dropped), and had therefore never "learned its lesson", namely the horrors of racial oppression and genocide.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation: A man claiming to be a time-travelling historian attempts to invoke this when Picard asks for his advice on their crisis of the week. Picard is profoundly unimpressed, calling it a problem for first-year philosophy students rather than reality. It turns out to be a moot point, as the historian is actually a time-travelling conman from the past.
    • Star Trek: Enterprise:
      • In "Storm Front" Captain Archer is urged by one of the people in the Alternate Universe where Germany is winning WW2 to use his phase cannons to destroy Berlin, but he tells her to be patient and let him correct history his way. This is a somewhat odd example, as history had already been massively screwed with, and conceivably Archer could have sterilized all of Earth to no ill effect, as the one event he did need to change would reset everything anyway.
      • Incidentally, that timeline may (or may not) have been the result of this trope applied to Lenin - someone assassinated him in 1916, the Soviet Union never came to be, and Hitler could concentrate on the West.
    • This trope is discussed in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in concerns with Khan Noonian-Singh as he is so important to humanity’s historical path than getting rid of him would bring about a Bad Future, no matter how benign or malicious. Interestingly, it's indicated that time itself has actually been enforcing this trope as best it can: apparently the reason the Eugenics Wars didn't start in 1992 is that multiple time travelers have attempted to sabotage it, but all they have managed is to push it slightly further into the future, and history is right back on track within a century or two.
    Romulan assassin: ...and I've been stuck here for thirty years!
  • In Supernatural Gordon uses this trope to try and justify killing Sam to Dean, asking him if he was able to sit next to a very young, aspiring Hitler, would he shoot him?
    • Made slightly Hilarious in Hindsight when Dean ends up shooting Hitler. Who was resurrected rather than Dean killing him through time travel, but still.
  • The Twilight Zone:
    • The Twilight Zone (1959): In the episode "No Time Like the Past", a time-traveler attempts to snipe Hitler during a speech from a hotel window. He had a nice clean shot, then his gun jammed. He is forced to abandon the attempt when the maid calls the police on him. It also handwaves the whole "doesn't think to go back farther" thing, as the time-traveler also attempted to prevent the sinking of the Lusitania. It doesn't work either.
    • The Twilight Zone (2002): In the episode "Cradle of Darkness", an agent comes back in time and kills an infant Adolf Hitler. In order not to be punished, his maid buys a beggar's baby and it is raised as Hitler, becoming the one we know.
  • Metal Hurlant Chronicles: In "The Pledge of Anya", a warrior is sent to kill a child possessed by a demon, but can't bring himself to do it and is shot by police. Then it turns out the kid was Hitler.
  • In Mystery Science Theater 3000 S11 E03: The Time Travelers Crow is presented with the scenario of a T. rex coming out of a time portal, he says he'd saddle it up and go Hitler-hunting in 1940s Germany.
  • In the final season of 12 Monkeys, the team goes to 1944 to get an artifact. They're thrown to find Hitler is a surprise visitor and a pair of French Resistance soldiers are planning to set off a bomb. It's played straight with the group trying to stop the bomb so they can get the clock. But in the closing scene a hysterical subversion comes in as Jennifer (a complete nutcase), sets off the bomb just because she can. Leader Katrina is shown at a bar, looking at a newspaper headline of Hitler's death while Himmler taking over and musing that the rest of World War II pretty much followed the same path, meaning killing Hitler at that point didn't really affect history at all.
  • This trope is the basic premise of Kamen Rider Zi-O, as it has time-travelers (Tsukuyomi and Geiz) come back in time fifty years to assassinate their "Hitler", Sougo Tokiwa aka "Oma Zi-O" ("Demon King of Time"), before he rises to power. The problem is that at this point in his life, Sougo is still a fundamentally decent person; and as Tsukuyomi and Geiz are also fundamentally decent people they can't bring themselves to kill him while he's still innocent and instead resolve to hang back and observe for the time being. Both have panicked at points and reached for their weapons when it looked like Sougo was taking steps toward becoming Oma Zi-O. Also complicating matters is that they're not the only time-travelers; Woz is loyal to Oma Zi-O and wants to preserve history as-is, while a group called the Time Jackers is trying to manipulate events to get their own Puppet King on Oma Zi-O's throne.
  • Studio C has one sketch where Doc Brown, Bill & Ted, The Doctor, Hermione Granger, and Spock all show up at the same time and place to try to kill Hitler. (Well, except for The Doctor, who is just there to serve Bill and Ted with papers for copyright infringement.) In the end, Hermione kills him, then hitches a ride with Bill and Ted back to her own time, because the Time Turner only travels backward and she doesn't want to take The Slow Path home.
  • In The Umbrella Academy Diego wants Number 5 to take back to kill Hitler when he's done trying to save John F. Kennedy.

    Music 
  • In the song "Parantaja" by Finnish garage metal band Riivaaja, a man of Jewish descent devises a time machine, travels to the past and assassinates Hitler. He returns to his own time to see the Soviets having completely taken over, and figures the only solution left is to go back to the past and assassinate himself.
  • Dan Bern's song "God Said No" has the narrator asking God to send him back in time to kill Hitler (as well as prevent the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Jesus). God refuses (duh), saying that if He did send the narrator back, he wouldn't actually do the things he claims he would, instead getting caught up in other, more self-serving activities.
  • Spoofed in Anal Cunt's "I Went Back In Time And Voted For Hitler", wherein the singer doesn't go back in time to kill Hitler but instead to vote for him.

    Newspapers 
  • Dean Burnett, writing for The Guardian, argues against assassinating Hitler here, on the basis that it's impossible to know whether doing so would make things worse (amongst other things).
  • The Washington Post article "You should not kill Baby Hitler. Try this instead" recognizes the futility of killing Baby Hitler and instead proposes that kidnapping Hitler as a child and raising him in Britain would be best.

    Stand Up Comedy 
  • Norm Macdonald has a famous bit about this, saying "people always want to murder Hitler with their time machine, but I'd be afraid I'd fall under the spell of his beautiful eyes."

    Tabletop Games 
  • In the Champions module "Wings of the Valkyrie," the heroes must go back in time to save Hitler after another time traveller kills him before the Nazi Party rises to power... creating an Alternate History where things came out even worse (Germany went communist; the West lost the alternate version of World War Two to the German-Soviet alliance; a falling-out between the victors led to World War Three; several cities have been nuked and the major powers don't seem at all afraid of doing it again when the next war breaks out; the United States is sliding into homegrown fascism). Most people in the alternate 1987 have a general sense that civilization is inevitably going down the drain.
    • It should be noted that the original version submitted by the credited author presented the heroes with an alternate history in which killing Hitler creates a worldwide Utopia; the point of the original version was to present the players with an opportunity to debate morality and present a hard choice about whether to restore the original history. Editorial meddling (and possibly concerns that such a module might be a campaign-ender) resulted in the published version, which greatly embarrassed the credited author. The less genre savvy readers included Holocaust survivors and the Anti-Defamation League, who had trouble with the premise that slaughtering 6,000,000+ Jews (and others) might make the world better.
  • In GURPS Time Travel, it is said that many new recruits to the Time Patrol ask this question: they are given more or less the same answers detailed at the top of this article.
    • It's also acknowledged, in a way, in the GURPS Infinite Worlds setting (which is more about crosstime travel). Some agents of Centrum (the antagonist timeline) have noticed that Homeliners get downright irrational (or even more so than usual) about timelines where Hitler exists, especially if he's winning. To Centrum, he's just another genocidal despot like so many in (other people's) history.
    • The GURPS WW2 sourcebook, in a passage concerning the use of Infinite Worlds and time travel, gives this very trope as an unnerving example of a quest hook, about the players having to go back in time to protect Hitler lest he gets assassinated and a far more skilled leader takes his place and wins the war for Germany.
  • Played with in Genius: The Transgression. You can kill Hitler, but it won't do anything (except get the Time Cops mad at you). Hitler has been killed six times over, so the setting's Time Cops started cloning him. If you head back to 1921 Hamburg, you can get a tour of the cloning facility. In an added twist, the Time Police got there a bit late — there was a Nazi party that led Germany to World War II and the Holocaust, but Hitler wasn't behind the reins first time around...
    • There's a very high rate of suicide among timecops who have to protect the Nazis.
  • In the time-travel RPG Continuum, the Fraternity of Thespians use various disguises and impersonate historical figures throughout time to prevent Narcissists from changing the Known universe. It's very rude to ask them how many times they've had to impersonate Hitler; the common reply is "Further information is not available here".
  • Feng Shui uses this trope in order to explain how superficial shifts (changes to temporal events that don't involve capturing Feng Shui sites) work in the setting. If you killed Hitler in the 19th century hoping to keep Nazism and its various atrocities from going down, it would not work, because somebody else would simply take Hitler's place.
  • In TimeWatch, the titular organization has a permanent base in Berlin specifically to deal with all the people who get their hands on time travel tech and decide to go kill Hitler. It's very busy.

    Theatre 
  • The short play If You Could Go Back... presents the scenario where the scientist that created the machine has to send her layabout roommate to stop the assassin she herself sent multiple times, as in each iteration they try and assassinate Hitler earlier and earlier in his career, and each version only makes things worse. At the ending, the scientist goes back to Hitler's childhood and talks to him and hugs him - changing his nature rather than adding violence to a violent world. Not that that changes the end result - a new dictator arises and does the exact same thing.
  • There is a 1966 Swedish play, Å, vilken härlig fred!, about war, democracy, and civil rights that touches on this. One scene is in an alternate history where Nazi Germany won WWII and... not very much seems different. A movie poster announces the latest 007 film — 007 Gert Fröbe, that is — and the latest teenage fad is rück und rüll music, but otherwise the actors read the actual newspaper of the day and discuss current events that the audience would be familiar with. But: when one of the actors complains about Hitler getting the Nobel Prize ("a fat geezer who spends his time at the Riviera wrapped in a blanket making bad paintings") a member of the audience fetches some policemen who drag the actor off stage.

    Toys 
  • Beast Wars: Uprising: One of the major nails in the backstory is that, during a version of the events of Beast Wars, Beast War's Megatron managed to get away with shooting Optimus Prime in the head, but before she could vanish from existence, Blackarachnia managed to fatally poison G1 Megatron in return. The result was that without Megatron, the Autobot / Decepticon war proved far more destructive to Earth, and just in general.

    Video Games 
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series:
    • The central premise of Command & Conquer: Red Alert is that shortly after World War II, Albert Einstein uses a Time Machine to meet Hitler at the one moment in history where his location in civilian life was absolutely verified (just outside the gates of Landsberg prison on December 20, 1924, after completing his sentence for his role in the Beerhall Putsch) and then erasing the future dictator from history. While this does succeed in preventing the original World War II, the power vacuum leads to an even greater conflict as Josef Stalin makes his own attempt to conquer the world, with the Soviets and Allies (including Germany) slugging it out with weirder weapons in a "Great World War II" that takes place in the 1950s or so.
    • In contrast, the Soviet campaign for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge has them steal the Allied time machine to reverse the outcome of the base game's war and prevent Yuri from enacting his renegade plan of setting up Psychic Dominators following their defeat in the main game, leading to a total Soviet victory and world domination of Communism. It may be that the time between the actions of the time travellers and that of the time period their actions affected was so small, and also involving essentially the same people, that the long-term implications were manageable - similar Timey-Wimey Ball shenanigans happen with the Allied campaign that only serve to see Yuri imprisoned before he can use his Psychic Dominators and General Carville avoiding the assassination attempt that claimed his life in the base game.
    • The Soviets pull an Einstein on Einstein in Red Alert 3; on the verge of defeat, they use a time machine of their own to take out the Allies' main scientist, erasing not only Einstein but the nuclear technology he helped create. While this causes the Soviet Union to be much more powerful in the new timeline, it inadvertently creates a new world power, the Empire of the Rising Sun, forcing the Soviets to ally with the Allies to defeat the Japanese (and canonically losing anyway). Einstein proves to be an exemption to this rule in that a corporation springs up to provide the Allies with chrono- technology in his place. Also note that by taking Einstein, and by extension nuclear weapons out of the picture, the game developers were able to create a war game that didn't involve dropping a nuclear bomb on the Japanese (never mind that previous games had Chrono-technology as a personal invention of Einstein, while nuclear weapons were developed by the Soviets, without Einstein directly contributing to the project, because the game runs on pure Rule of Cool and camp, and the developers certainly don't want you to think about the story).
    • Red Alert 3: Corona, a planned Fan Sequel Game Mod for 3, has this as the backstory: When the Empire of the Rising Sun surrendered to the Allies and Emperor Yoshiro consequently died of grief, his son Crown Prince Tatsu ordered a group of loyal Imperial scientists to recreate the Soviet time machine. Tatsu travelled back to The Middle Ages, saved Möngke Khan (one of Genghis Khan's grandsons) from a cannonball shot that would have killed him, and gave the Mongol horde access to Imperial weapons that allowed them to sweep across Europe in a Curb-Stomp Battle, in the hope of destroying western civilization and preventing the Allies and Soviets from ever rising to power. Then, he disposed of Möngke with the classic handshake of historical retconning and left the Mongols to tear themselves apart, back to the present satisfied of a job well done. On coming back, Tatsu discovers to his horror that not only do the Allies and Soviets still exist despite his attempts to wipe out their ancestors, but a new global superpower has emerged. Known as the Celestial Empire, they are equal or even superior even to the Empire of the Rising Sun and have designs to conquer Japan and perhaps the entire planet.
  • In the early flight combat sim Corncob 3D, Hitler was apparently killed by a thrown bottle earlier in his life. In place of WWII, however, there was an alien invasion. Somewhat inexplicably, F4U Corsairs are still developed and flown against the alien threat.
  • In War Front: Turning Point, Hitler is assassinated very early in WWII. This, however, makes things worse: under the even more effective leadership of his successor, the Nazis are able to occupy Great Britain. And when they are eventually defeated, things go haywire: Russians take Germany's fall as the chance to advance into Western Europe, triggering a new conflict with the Allies.
  • In an unused poster in Portal 2, you are informed to, in event of time travel, avoid both your past and future selves, your dad, and Hitler. An unused and unrecorded Cave Johnson line states that all alternate parallel universe versions of you (or whatever test subject he was talking to at the time) are Hitler. He also warns you not to kill him if you meet him during the tests.
  • Somewhat averted in Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. The protagonist is a former British government agent, waiting in his apartment in the London of 1942 for a German bomb to land on him. He reflects on the past, and how it could have been altered. Somehow, he then ends up back on the Titanic, given a second chance to complete his mission. If you succeed, and manage to escape on a lifeboat with three particular items, Hitler never comes to power, WWI is similarly averted, and peace and prosperity reigns in Europe. Of course, if you escape but with two or fewer of the three items, in any particular order, there are various other horrible fates waiting for Europe, such as Soviet dictatorship under Stalin (without any Hitler to counter him, his power grew far greater) or the world wars not only going ahead, but Germany invading Britain. Amusingly, one of the items is a painting done by Hitler, which if recovered, makes him a famous artist, and thus he has no time to involve himself in politics.
  • "Time Travel Travesty" inverted the trope, in that the time-traveller WANTED something bad to happen. An evil genius comes up with an Evil Plan, go back in time to kill Hitler causing the Soviet Union to take over Europe. His henchman called him out on it, stating he's just copying the plot of Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Unlike Red Alert though, the universe just explodes.
  • Due to the way time travel works in Quantum Break, killing Hitler is impossible (long story short, the furthest back you can go is the first activation of the time machine you're using, and the first time machine was activated in 1999). You can find a draft for a book on time travel by Will where a note mentions that he's really sick of hearing jokes about killing Hitler.
  • A non time-travel related example in the fourth Hearts of Iron game: If the player derails the course of history in some way (the most obvious example being having Germany overthrow Hitler) in an attempt to avoid conflict, the game will go out of it's way to have other nations abandon their historical path and go out of their way to cause conflict with the player (i.e., if Germany opts to overthrow Hitler, France will abandon it's historical Democratic path and either go Communist if Germany restores the Kaiserreich and allies with Britain, or Fascist if Germany restores the Weimar Republic as a constitutional monarchy - an exception is if Germany restores the Kaiserreich but opts to reform the Central Powers, due to that path still putting Germany in conflict with the Allies), and unless the player takes out other nations that would cause trouble early on, those nations will still go down their historical paths (using the aforementioned example with Germany, the Soviets will still make their territorial demands from their neighbors in Europe, and Italy and Japan will still attack Greece or Yugoslavia and China respectively). Additionally, In Spite of a Nail, Hitler can still cause trouble (albeit under a Paper-Thin Disguise) if he fakes his death and either Argentinanote , Greecenote , or the United Statesnote  go fascistnote .
  • Non-Hitler example in Legacy of Kain: The vampire Kain, while leading a losing battle against the army of the brutal tyrant Nemesis, travels back in time. There he murders Nemesis's past self, the boy-king William the Just, before he turns evil and unstoppable. When he returns to his time, he finds the vampire race almost wiped out by crusaders avenging their beloved king. It turns out Kain was set up by Moebius, who arranged both the time travel, William's turn to evil, and the subsequent crusades.

    Visual Novels 
  • Heinz Heger in Shikkoku no Sharnoth has apparently been going for something like this. Whether it works or not is left ambiguous, but he himself views it as a failure.

    Webcomics 
  • Subnormality:
    • In this comic, the time travelers are all shot dead by Hitler’s guards before they can kill him, but their constant attempts on his life are making his guards worry about how the future’s going to turn out.
    • In this comic, a sign on the time machine warns that “Booth is not to be used to kill Hitler”.note 
    • Parodied and inverted here, where two neo-Nazis try to travel back in time to kill President Roosevelt and cause the Allies to lose the war… only to fail when they evidently forget there were two presidents by that name and get their car thrown at them by President Theodore Roosevelt.
      Theodore Roosevelt: I do declare you boys picked the wrong Roosevelt!
  • Played with in these webcomics on Squidi.net (keep clicking forward).
  • Parodied by Starslip here. Maverick of Deep Time used to kill Hitler and then go back in time to stop himself for fun.
  • Averted (so far) in Jesus Christ In The Name Of The Gun. Jesus, himself, does this, although it was much more difficult than expected.
  • The Non-Adventures of Wonderella:
    • Used with "communist" China in this this strip where Wonderella goes back in time to prevent China's air pollution problems and in the process save a young boy from drowning. When Wonderita worries about how this might impact the future, Wonderella states that things will be fine on the reasoning that a) it's just a little kid and b) he's named Mao "like a kitty cat!" so things will turn out fine.
    • Invoked in this strip, when Wonderella gets her hands on a baby Hitler. She and Patrietta consider 'fixing' him to not be a monster (or as much of one), Queen Beetle points out that Hitler was too influential to history to change, and even influencing him to be an ordinary citizen would create a Grandfather Paradox. They send him back, but let him keep his teddy bear. Cue killer chainsaw-wielding teddy bear robots.
      Queen Beetle: [If Hitler] wasn't a monster anymore, you'd never do this in the first place. There'd be no reason to "fix" a nice Hitler.
  • The main character of Least I Could Do decides to write an "alternate history" novel. Guess what the plot is?
  • Irregular Webcomic!:
    • In one comic, Steve the crocodile hunter is told that his plan to stop the war by taking out Hitler can’t work, as it’s impossible for time travellers to kill Hitler — which doesn’t impede his plans much, since he was planning on wrestling him into submission, not killing him. (Of course, the comic has a reference to this page).
    • Also mentioned here, where the Mythbusters’ younger selves consider killing Hitler as a way to test out their time machine.
      Young Jamie: A.k.a.: “How much more can we mess up history?”
    • Here, they dismiss the possibility of doing it because it’s been done so often that they’ve run out of original punchlines on the topic.
  • Averted in Lightning Made of Owls, but even if the plan goes perfectly, don't expect any gratitude:
    Samantha: His success is your fault? But he's the most overrated artist of the 20th century! What could have possibly been worse?
  • Inverted in Black Adventures, where N and Black travel back in time to save Hitler.
  • Played straight in this arc of This Is Douglas, where the main characters are foiled by a Grandfather Paradox.
  • Spinnerette Issue 8 begins with a time traveling Ben Franklin unwitting saving Hitler from as of now unknown time traveling assassin while completely nude. Starting here
    • Franklin's super power is also based on this same principle: probability goes out of its way to ensure no harm comes to Ben.
  • Square Root of Minus Garfield has this comic, where killing Hitler invokes one of the strip's Running Gags.
  • Discussed in this Real Life Comics; Greg wants to go back in time and change something trivial (Las Vegas choosing to build a giant TV instead of a life-size U.S.S. Enterprise) and Tony points out all the cause-and-effect even a twenty-year change would cause before adding "Why do you think I haven't gone back to the mid-1930's and killed Hitler before World War II started?"
  • xkcd:
    • Played with when Black Hat Guy goes and kills Hitler... in April 1945, in the bunker, while the Red Army is storming the city and Hitler is just about to commit suicide. Played straight from the perspective of the person who persuaded him to do it, since it was a reasonable assumption that he'd know to do it before World War 2. Black Hat guy was right after all when he said they should have used the time machine to do something fun, instead of wasting their only chance at time travel in a futile attempt to satisfy the other's person's "obsession with this Hitler guy". Of course, given what a humongous troll Black Hat Guy is, it's entirely likely that he deliberately missed the point of the other person's insistance on killing Hitler out of spite, thus calling into question exactly how futile it would have been otherwise. Also we only have Black Hat Guy's word on what he did with the time machine.
    • Beret Guy also travels through time to kill Hitler. He finds it easier than expected because he traveled to the future by hiding in a time capsule.
      Beret Guy: Anyway, I'm here to kill Hitler.
      Ponytail: But he died long ago!
      Beret Guy: Oh, good! That was easy.
    • In this strip, one of the main character's future selves traveled back in time to kill Hitler, but they got the year way off, traveling to the present day instead of the 1900's.
  • Referenced in Homestuck when Jake meets Meenah, who in another lifetime went on to become an evil empress and then traveled to this universe, took over earth, flooded it, and wiped out almost all of humanity. Jake reasons that this basically makes her fish-Hitler, and therefore that, since everyone knows that if you travel back in time and meet Hitler you must kill him, he should immediately beat her up. Except, of course, he hasn't gone back in time, and Meenah isn't even really the same person as the Condesce anyway, so all he achieves is beating up an innocent person while their friends freak out around them. Then again, Meenah was already dead...and she barely noticed because she had just learned about said alternate self and was Squeeing over her. So maybe not that innocent.
  • In Captain SNES: The Game Masta, one of the non-canon side stories include this. The end result is a dystopian future with a gendercide. Alex, however, finds himself intrigued when Marle throws herself at him. So much so that he wants the Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act repealed.
  • Commander Badass of Manly Guys Doing Manly Things is a member of the Navy TIALS, an elite group of time traveling soldiers from the future who go to right wrongs in history. While Hitler himself is mostly left alone (aside from getting a punch in the face), the Vietnam War is presented in this context: the Commander went to that time period twice, once to win the war for America, and a second time to stop himself cause winning the war caused the Rambo movies to never exist, and that's just too bizarre a world to contemplate.
  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal :
    • Referenced in this strip: Hitler only came to power because of the meddling of a time traveler who went back in time to kill a man named Hartler whose ascent to power caused... a longer version of the Great Depression. This is actually a real argument against trying to change the past, as one can't predict what will happen in the altered timeline.
    • Averted in this one, where the time traveler succeeds by going back and providing Hitler with a scholarship at an art school at the right moment. Although history is vastly improved, the traveler discovers that it still has a few disturbing side effects.
    • Possibility C of the red button hover-over is that the reason no time travellers show up to prevent bad things from happening is that they’re really bad at doing things like killing Hitler.
    • And yet another twist — Hitler becomes so good at killing time travellers that the people of the far future have to recruit him to fight time travelling invaders from even farther in the future, all of which turns out to be the plot of a cheap movie.
    • In this one, the result of killing Hitler turned out so well that humanity began systematically hunting down every historical villain in order to improve the present. However, the definition of what constitutes a "villain" predictably dropped over time from people like Hitler and Vlad the Impaler to regular jerks to people who were not perfect, flawless saints. In the end, humanity retroactively wipes itself out of existence. It turns out to have all been a plot by future aliens to trick humans into removing themselves from the timeline.
    • A part of this is discussed in this comic, where the alien points out that it's a bit alarming that humans focus on "killing Hitler" instead of doing something non-violent to prevent his rise.
  • A played with variant appears in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. The mysterious Chrononaut turns out to be Chuck Goodrich, the mayor of Cumberland... or rather, an alternate version of Chuck. See Chuck is a time traveler who came back in time to prevent a Zombie Apocalypse that destroyed the future. Only he's not the first or last Chuck to come back in time; every time a Chuck comes back and helps prevent the apocalypse, it just spirals into a new timeline where something else destroyed the world. The result is that the timeline we follow is regularly getting a new Chuck Goodrich.
    • A slightly straighter version crops up later; the zombie-timeline Chuck, tired of King Radical's constant outwitting of the heroes, uses the time portal under Cumberland to go back in time and try to kill Radical hundreds of years before he can even begin his evil plan. Unfortunately for Chuck, a Stable Time Loop and the fact that Radical is an alternate Chuck Goodrich as well means that Radical kills him and proceeds to dedicate part of his life to tracking down the Chuck that will eventually try to kill him.
  • Israeli webcomic The Ism points out a potential problem:
    (Outskirts of Berlin, 1910note )
    Jew: (Appearing naked out of thin air, Terminator-style) Get over here Hitler! I'm gonna make you PAY!
    Hitler: (Having just killed him) This is the TENTH time a random Jew has tried to kill me. THERE MUST BE SOME SOLUTION TO THIS JEWISH PROBLEM.
    • Original Hebrew here; it’s slightly different than the English version.
  • In this Super Fun Pak Comix, a time traveler triumphantly declares that he's stopped World War II and the Holocaust by killing someone named Krauss. After his friend asks if he means Hitler, the time traveler grumbles that this would be the eighth time he's had to go back and kill someone.
  • In the commentary for this Nerf NOW!! comic Jo specifically says that he would not go try killing Hitler should he gain the ability to time travel because of this trope. Instead, he's going to EVO 2004 to see the infamous Daigo parry against Justin live. And maybe buy stock in Google before it took off.
  • In thissequence from The Starship Destiny, the Guardian of Time initially refuses to allow Gizmo to change history by killing Hitler, but acquiesces when Gizmo proposes a second trip to stop himself from killing Hitler. He instead decides to help his past self kill Hitler and stop himself next time, leading to an army of himself all killing Hitler together and ultimately resulting in an infinite loop that destroys time itself. It ends when he is prevented from going back in time in the first place by his future self, who warns him of the consequences and gives him a video recording of himself killing Hitler.
  • Referenced in League of Super Redundant Heroes. "You went back in time to kill Hitler and prevent World War 2. That's like Time Travel 101. It sounds like a good idea, but you have no idea what the consequences would be to a change that massive".

    Web Animation 
  • Averted in Red vs. Blue The Shisno Paradox, where Tucker and Sister offhandedly mention they shot Hitler during an argument. Though it's not quite clear if they killed Hitler before his rise to power, or shot him while he was in his bunker during the last days of the Reich.
  • Ducktalez: Dewey attempts to avert this as soon as he gets time travel powers in episode five, but ultimately is forced to play it straight, even ending up saving Hitler himself

    Web Original 
  • Invoked in the Alternate History timeline Weber's Germany; Paul Driscoll from the The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "No Time Like the Past" manages to shoot Hitler during the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, but that just leads Friedrich Weber, otherwise a historical nobody, to seize control of the Nazi Party, then Germany, radically changing the course of World War II. According to Word of God, this led to the passage of a law banning attempts to change history through time travel.
  • Discussed in the The Thrilling Adventure Hour Amelia Earhart, when Amelia realizes the Nazis are gunning for her by preventing her parents from being together. She and her handler Abby Adams mention they can't do the same to Hitler because his nursery is heavily guarded.
  • SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-2451 is created by an attempt by the American military to send one of the soldiers back in time to kill Hitler, only for seemingly nothing to happen. However, said soldier winds up becoming a walking temporal anomaly, through which other time travelers from other dimensions exit to kill their historical genocidal tyrants.
    • A rejected SCP that made it into SCP-100-J was "Little Addie", a duplicate of a six-year-old Hitler who was terminated without any alterations to the timestream.
    • There is also an inversion in the form of SCP-3780, where the Foundation has to ensure JFK is assassinated and stop time travelers/other anomalies from preventing the shooting.
    • SCP-CN-2965 is Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone. For some reason, time travellers who want to kill Hitler keep targeting him instead, causing all the near-death accidents that he experienced during his childhood.
  • Why the grandfathers? asks Lore Sjöberg in this short story.

    Web Video 
  • In this Cracked video, time-traveling assassins fail because they pick the wrong date, arriving during the siege of Berlin (the day Hitler would have killed himself anyway). And they almost (but not quite) help him survive.
  • This parody PSA is an inversion, with a time-traveling Hitler narrowly avoiding getting hit by a car.
  • In the Glove and Boots video 10 Reasons Why Time Travel is No Good, the concept of going back in time and killing Hitler is mentioned. However, it theorizes that doing so could create an alternate reality with zombie Hitler or a universe with 20 Hitlers.
  • Parodied in Hardly Working's Killing Hitler. The first time they try it, the adult Hitler beats up the time traveller. The second time he does it again, but as an adolescent. The third time traveller attacks him with a rifle when he's a small child. However, Hitler steals it, and then forces the traveller to tell him how to make an atomic bomb. And then kid Hitler travels through the portal into the future. And to add insult to injury, he renamed the city of Berlin Owen Sux.
  • Averted in Punching Hitler; although they don't kill him, they punch him repeatedly, causing him to change the direction of his life repeatedly in the end and presumably averting the Holocaust.
  • In Rooster Teeth's Macrowave Time Machine short, Chris invents the time machine by putting a microwave inside a bigger microwave and turning them both on. The first time he uses it, he goes back in time to kill Hitler, and every other time he goes back again to fix what he screwed up the last time he went, each time making things worse in the present.
  • This time machine tale takes a moment from stealing cereal through time and creating paradoxes to explain why it won't work.
  • This parody 'ad' for Mercedes shows a car stopping automatically when two kids are playing in the road, but then mowing down child-Hitler, as the car "recognizes dangers before they arise".
  • Sam Hyde has a famous sketch where he's on a date with a Jewish woman who asks him where he would live if he lived in another time period, and Sam goes on to theorize about how he'd end up becoming "Hitler's top guy" if he lived in Nazi-occupied France despite disliking Hitler and disapproving of his actions, because Hitler's charisma would have been too difficult to resist. During the same sketch, he says that he wishes someone would time travel back to before Hitler was born to take him out.

    Western Animation 
  • Subverted as a Discussed Trope in South Park: in the episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft", Cartman directly asks Clyde if he would go back in time and kill Hitler given the chance, then adds that he himself wouldn't because he thinks Hitler was awesome.
  • In the Futurama episode "The Late Phillip J. Fry", Farnsworth creates a time machine that can only go forwards in time. However, it can still be used to travel to any time you want because after the end of the universe, it just restarts from the beginning and everything plays out the exact same way as before (assuming no outside interference). During one loop, Farnsworth makes a stop in Nazi Germany to kill Hitler. However, we don't get to see how this changes history since they overshoot their destination again and have to make another go-around. This time, Farnsworth is too lazy to stop and tries to shoot Hitler from the time machine while it's moving. He misses and kills Eleanor Roosevelt instead (we don't get to see how that changes history either).
  • In the Time Warp Trio episode "Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba", the group warps back to 1815 France and inadvertently help Napoléon Bonaparte win the Battle of Waterloo. After returning to the present they see that France ended up taking over the world, with America in particular being renamed "New France", and they have to go back to fix it.
  • Robot Chicken demonstrates a possible loophole to this trope: a skit during the episode called "Dicks With Time Machines" features...well, dicks screwing around with the past. However, the last one doesn't try to kill Hitler but instead chooses to publicly humiliate him by showing footage of him on the toilet at one of his rallies. This effectively destroys Hitler's ability to get anyone to listen to him and changes the name of the skit to "Heroes with Time Machines".
  • Downplayed in The Simpsons; Homer wakes up at work thinking he has traveled back in time and the first thing that comes to his mind is stopping Hitler, but he is in the present day and just missed the point about a retrospective radio show talking as if the year were 1939. The writers also toyed with this idea for a sci-fi themed Halloween episode but nothing was produced and only a raw internal short touched the topic.
  • China, IL had an episode in which Steve Smith and Ronald Reagan worked together to avert every disaster that had ever taken place, including stopping Lincoln's assassination and converting Hitler to Judaism. This inevitably resulted in the present age being attacked by every apocalyptic event possible, and as for Hitler, the Nazi party was now made up of Jews.
  • Justice League: "The Savage Time" involves traveling back in time to World War II, where Vandal Savage has usurped control over the Nazis after being told, in a time-traveled message from his future self, that he "has to get rid of that lunatic Hitler" and seize control in order for the Germans to win the second World War. Strangely, though, Savage only freezes Hitler in cryogenic suspension, rather than more permanently disposing of him, and thusly Hitler is thawed out and restored to his "proper place" after Savage is defeated, hence fitting this trope. An attempted Author's Saving Throw was a subsequent commentary by the producers that this means that World War II happened but the Holocaust did not, courtesy of Savage's aborted attempt at changing the future.
  • In Mike Tyson Mysteries, the reformed Mike Tyson swore he would never use his fists for destruction except on two people: The "grandmaster" of the Klu Klux Klan, and Adolf Hitler. This last one ends up being used by Pigeon to trick Mike into freeing the brain of Bobby Fisher, which was put inside Deep Blue by the android CEO of IBM. Fortunately for Mike, he later manages to accomplish his dream of killing Hitler when Marquess takes them back in time to 1889 to apologize to his son and Oscar Wilde, and they happen across Klara Hitler who asks them to watch her baby. Unfortunately, when they return to the present, they see that without Hitler the Jews took over the world. Mike doesn't seem to mind too much, however.
  • On a closely related note, an episode of Freakazoid! involves the clownish hero traveling back in time and, almost accidentally, preventing the attack on Pearl Harbor. Realizing what he's done, he wonders what his own time will be like now. "What hath Freak wrought?!" he wonders aloud. He returns home to find that... everything is exactly the same, except that Sharon Stone is now a Shakespearian actress, there are no Chevy Chase movies, and Rush Limbaugh is standing on a street corner collecting charity donations for the poor. He decides these are good changes. (Oh, and the Brain is President of the United States).
  • American Dad! had an episode where Steve and his friends modded a video game into one where they go back in time to prevent Hitler from existing by beating a boss fight against a monstrous Klara Hitler who is visibly pregnant with Adolf as a fetus, only to fail in their attempt. Later, after trapping Stan in his own Lotus-Eater Machine and creating a giant zombie using the Klara code that turns out to be too powerful for them to delete normally, they program the Hitler fetus into the zombie to give it a weak point for Steve to shoot.
  • Love, Death & Robots: "Alternate Histories" supposes an app that postulates a series of increasingly ridiculous scenarios for Hitler dying at art college. Lampshaded by the app, which states that Hitler dying early is one of the most popular scenarios people look at. Beaten to death on the street,note  run over by horse-drawn sausage cart,note  suffocated by experimental Russian gelatin-encasing weapon,note  sexed to death by space hookers,note  crushed by meteor,note  and finally caught in the crossfire between time-traveling Nazis and anti-Nazis, only to be saved by and then make contact with future self, causing a paradox.note 
  • Invoked in the Rick and Morty episode "Rattlestar Ricklactica". After a planet of snakes have decided to invade Earth, Rick goes back in time and leaves them a book that will lead them to invent time travel, expecting them to exploit this recklessly. Sure enough, after averting Snake Lincoln's assassination leads to the rise of snake Nazis, this leads to an attempt to go back in time to kill Snake Hitler that culminates in countless snakes going back in time to either save or kill Hitler to the point that it leads to a massive pile of snake corpses. This ends up alerting the Time Police, who then go back in time to stop them from becoming sapient in the first place.
  • Played with in the final episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The Batman Cold Open has Batman team up with Abraham Lincoln to stop Lincoln's assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth, only for the last few seconds to reveal Batman was saving the Lincoln of a parallel universe instead of his own. The fact Booth was a Steampunk Cyborg might have been a subtle clue.
  • In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Cupid's Errant Arrow", Captain Docent mentions having to go back and kill somebody who was worse than Hitler as one of his more stressful missions.

    Other 
  • Atlanta Radio Theatre Company has a Radio Drama-style story called The Assassins, where a time traveler trying to halt WWII assassinates a six-year-old boy to prevent the rise of Nazi Germany. The twist? Hitler was the guy who replaced the dictator-to-be that was assassinated.
  • One recurring joke in John and Hank Green's Brotherhood 2.0 videos is the Evil Baby Orphanage, a project suggested by a fan during an argument over whether killing Baby Hitler was ethical: instead of killing him, kidnap and raise him in a hidden mountain orphanage with other kidnapped historical despots.
  • Referenced in real life when Braunau am Inn, the Austrian town where Hitler was born, was captured by the Allies. Among the residents who spoke up at a meeting where the townsfolk decided to surrender without a fight was the elderly midwife who'd aided in Hitler's birth. She pointed out that their town would already suffer a black mark throughout history, in part because she hadn't strangled him as a newborn; as much as she wished she'd done so, the shames of the past couldn't be changed, and putting up a futile resistance now would only reinforce that stain.


Besides, you know who else killed Hitler? Hitler! And you don't want to be like Hitler, do you?

 
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Alternative Title(s): Hitlers Murder Paradox

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TVA Saves Baby Hitler from Cap

After returning the Infinity Stones, Captain America time travels to kill baby Hitler, but the TVA stops him in order to preserve the Sacred Timeline.<br>(Also, Hitler was born in 1889, so this must be a variant Hitler born 10 years later.)

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4.75 (16 votes)

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Main / HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct

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