Playing With / Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act

Basic Trope: You can't go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler without dire consequences.

• Straight: Killing Hitler before he commits suicide on April 30, 1945, causes World War II to be longer and bloodier.
• Exaggerated:
  • Killing Hitler even a fraction of a nanosecond early causes a horrific Time Crash that shatters the universe into innumerable little pieces.
  • Whatever other rules of time travel the tale follows, it is impossible to do anything to Hitler. You can do literally anything else, prevent Pompeii from going off and dinosaurs from going extinct, save Constantinople from the Ottoman Turks, turn Genghis Khan into a geek so colossal that Woody Allen could have played him in The Conqueror, strangle Josef Stalin in his crib, help Napoleon win at Waterloo, turn Richard Nixon into a used car salesman and Ronald Reagan a multiple winner of The EGOTs, but time travellers may as well pretend the period from April 20, 1889 and April 30, 1945, inclusive, just does not exist.
  • Any time traveller who tries to visit Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, or Nazi Germany finds that they just can't. Their time machine automatically sends them to All the Little Germanies, Prussia, West Germany, East Germany, or (most often) modern Germany at random, too long before Hitler is born (and thus risking a different Butterfly of Doom by trying to change things so he cannot exist/gain power) or after he's dead.
  • Any time someone thinks of killing Hitler, whether they are capable of time travel or not, members of the Time Police disappear or mind-wipe them just in case.
  • Causing Hitler to stub his toe results in Hitler conquering the multiverse.
  • Killing Emperor Hirohito or even Benito Mussolini before WW2 would cause Hitler to conquer the entire universe. However, killing anyone else (even Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill) would either do nothing or possibly even benefit the universe. (On that note, killing Roosevelt, Churchill, or any of the other allied leaders would pretty much guarantee a Utopia later down the line.)
  • Ensuring that Germany wins WW1, or otherwise trying to do even the most minute things that would convince Hitler to not take over Germany and casue WW2 would cause a Class Z-4 apocalypse.
• Downplayed:
  • Killing Hitler early makes the war in Europe three days longer and causes the moon landing to be delayed by a year.
  • Killing Hitler has no major effect — somebody else takes his place and does things the same way to the same end.
  • Alternatively, you can get young Hitler into art school, but another aggressive German nationalist simply rises in his place and launches a war. On the other hand, this guy doesn't have genocidal designs against Jewish, black, Roma, and Slavic people, so him winning isn't that terrible.
  • You could go back in time to the Paris Peace Conference and draft and implement a more lenient version of the Treaty of Versailles. That, however, would only inspire a communist dictator to start World War II ten years later.
• Justified:
  • In the absence of Hitler, a more competent dictator took over the regime and caused the Allies even more trouble.
  • In the absence of Hitler, Stalin or another contemporary major dictator is motivated to cause a longer and bloodier war.
  • WW2 caused a war between our Time Police and the Zeitkorps. We eventually defeated the latter, but that area of the timeline is an utter mess and the travesties cannot be prevented without reviving the Zeitkorps.
  • The Time Police spells out to the potential time traveler that, historically, assassinations have caused more harm than good, citing the assassinations of Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Abraham Lincoln as examples of why you can never solve the problems of the world by killing one person and the consequences can spiral out of control.
  • Related to the above: "Do you know who Gavrilo Princip, the man who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, really was? He was a time traveler just like you, trying to create a bright future for Serbia. Now do you see why temporal assassination is a much worse idea than it might seem at first?"
  • Causality refuses to allow a paradox. Bob invented the time machine that he planned to use to kill Hitler, so he couldn't possibly use it to change the past, so he'd never have invented it. Ipso facto, if Bob has the time machine, Hitler must have started World War II.
  • Hitler himself was so utterly racist that it made people start to become more progressive and politically correct. Killing him would basically mean that racism and other sorts of bigotry would run rampant in our present.
• Inverted:
  • A group of time-travelling neo-Nazis kills Winston Churchill early, but the murder just spurs the United Kingdom and its allies into attacking Germany sooner.
  • Killing Franklin D. Roosevelt early causes the United States to enter the war much sooner and inspires the Manhattan Project to be developed much earlier, which they use the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs from said Manhattan Project to utterly decimate Germany, sparing Nagasaki and Hiroshima respectively in the process. When the neo-Nazis return to their present, they find that Berlin has been reduced to an irradiated crater, and the rest of the German Reich split between France, Poland, and an Israeli satellite state.
  • Killing Albert Lebrun early causes France to fight with such vigor that the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys will practically never have existed as a trope. In fact, the neo-Nazis may return to a completely French-dominated Berlin, and a stereotype that portrays the Germans as easily surrendering cowards.
  • A group of time-travelling neo-Nazis talks Hitler out of suicide, but this causes World War II to end sooner.
  • Hitler himself time-travels to the past in a desperate attempt to change his fate, but he becomes the catalyst of his inevitable suicide.
  • Killing Hitler at any time on any day between September 1, 1939 and April 29, 1945 brings WWII to a halt and makes the future a better place. Killing him before the former date, meanwhile, prevents it from ever happening.
  • A character from an alternate timeline goes back in time to kill some significantly despotic German chancellor who never came to power in our own timeline, but this act enables a much worse figure, Hitler himself, to come to power, thus creating our timeline.
  • Hitler's historically-accurate suicide is a result of time travel. WWII originally was worse, and our timeline is actually an improved version.
  • Many of the real failed attempts on Hitler's life were thwarted by time-travelling neo-Nazis.
  • Hitler himself was a time traveler, either an agent from a totalitarian Alternate Timeline sent to take over our time branch (and possibly going rogue to usurp it for himself, making good on his own hatreds), or a disgruntled fanatic trying to Make Wrong What Once Went Right.
• Subverted:
  • Bob announces his intent to stop The Holocaust before heading back in time. Time Police expect him to kill Hitler and prepare to stop him. They watch over Hitler during the period Bob visited and he never shows up, much less tries to kill Hitler. It turns out Bob infiltrated the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles instead and prevented the reparations and other terms and conditions that helped lead to the Nazis' rise.
  • Bob goes back in time and kills Hitler ... in a way that is mistaken for a suicide.
• Double Subverted:
  • However, that allows Josef Stalin's power to run unchecked, and he invades the now-peaceful Europe with no less brutality than Hitler would have.
  • Alternately, Benito Mussolini takes over Europe by slowly but surely, conquering territory via well-planned-out attacks and swaying fascists in Spain and the weakened Germany over to his side. Stalin goes with his original plan to wait things out, which leads to a Cold War between Capitalists and Communists.
  • Bob's attack only left Hitler Not Quite Dead.
• Parodied:
  • All time machines have a prominently placed placard saying "NO MURDERING HITLER" in big red letters.
  • When the would-be assassins reach Hitler, they find him posing Atop a Mountain of Corpses of Time-Travellers.
  • Bob kills Hitler and prevents WWII. He returns to the present time and finds that his interference has caused all sorts of illogical consequences, such as Dvorak becoming the most widely used keyboard layout, the line "Beam Me Up, Scotty!" actually being said in Star Trek: The Original Series, and his friend Alice growing a handlebar mustache.
  • Bob is thwarted from killing Hitler by the Time Police not to keep the timeline unchanged or to prevent an even worse scenario, but because if Hitler never rises to power they can't insult people by comparing them to Nazis.
  • Bob's attempt to kill Hitler fails entirely because Can't Take Anything with You is the rule for Time Travel in this story. Mr. Exposition explains later that Bob could have killed Hitler without causing any problems if he didn't have to arrive naked and unarmed.
• Zig-Zagged:
  • Killing Hitler prevents the Nazi Party from taking power in Germany. However, World War II still occurs with a more competent and dangerous revival of the German Empire which causes more military casualties on both sides and a prolonged war. On the bright side, many atrocities never occur due to being a poor use of resources.
  • A young German artist time-travels to 1900 to try to assassinate a would-be dictator when he's still a child, all because of a vague prophecy. He specifically targets artists because he learned that the would-be dictator was an artist. While it seems that he managed to kill Hitler since he wiped out all artists in Germany, he never realised one thing which renders all his efforts useless: He is Adolf Hitler.
  • Bob tries asking his fellow Time Police if any of them would go back to kill Hitler, only for Charlie, one of the founding members, to answer that he killed Hitler without time travel, since he was already alive during World War II and made it look like the suicide history knows it as.
  • Alice goes back in time to kill Hitler early, comes back to her time to see the adverse effects it's caused, and goes back in time to save him from herself. But she can't bring herself to follow through on it...
  • Hitler's early death, like everything else in history, has both positive and negative consequences. There may never be a World War II or Holocaust, but South Africa and British India could collapse into civil war.
• Averted:
  • Killing Hitler before September 1, 1939 prevents World War II without fouling things up any worse.
  • You can kill Hitler, but it will just create a new timeline where Hitler died, while Hitler still lived until his suicide in 1945 in your timeline.
  • Hitler dies in your own hands and once you return to the future, everything returns to being as peaceful as it was before his rule even started...all in the same timeline, thus unpersoning him.
• Enforced:
  • The author can't imagine the world where World War II hasn't happened.
  • The series has a strict rule against changing history.
• Lampshaded:
  Bob: I wish I had a time machine.
  Alice: And what would you do with it, go back and kill Adolf Hitler?
  Bob: Please ... everyone knows that would only make things worse.
• Invoked: The Time Police monitor Hitler and prevent time-travelers from killing him so that history runs its natural course.
• Exploited:
  • People use the "killing Hitler" gimmick as a way to lure dumb people onto a time machine and dump them wherever they would make the least impact possible.
  • An angry Mad Scientist who wants a lot of people dead releases time-travel tech onto the Internet and sits back to behold the inevitable piling up of bodies at certain important junctions of time (Hitler is a top choice, but even The Day the Music Died has its ragers) from time travelers struggling to "correct"/"ruin" the timeline.
• Defied:
  • After killing Hitler, the time-travellers stay in the past to ensure that history runs a new course that they plotted.
  • The way Time Travel works in the setting wouldn't allow anybody to kill Hitler even if they wanted to (such as a variation of Mental Time Travel that only allows people to see through other people's eyes à la Being John Malkovich, only being able to travel as far back as the day after John F. Kennedy's assassination, or being placed on the date that would allow an assassination of Hitler ... on Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, meaning it would take at least a week to get to Europe. And if they try to jump one week earlier to prevent this offset, the machine just dumps them in Antarctica a week after the planned date for killing Hitler).
• Discussed: "Yes, I have a time machine. No, we're not killing Hitler. It never works, OK."
• Conversed: "I wonder why killing Hitler always ends bad for time travelers on TV." "Perhaps because World War II was such a crucial event for the twentieth century? You can't just remove that and call it a day."
• Implied: Alice and Bob went back in time to Nazi Germany circa 1935 with deadly weapons. They come back joyful at first, then they look around and see things are very different ... or, worse, that they have not changed at all.
• Deconstructed:
  • To make sure nobody messes up the course of modern history, a Time Police is established, focusing on protecting Hitler against time travellers. Since this work makes the Time Police complicit in Nazi Germany's multifarious crimes (and its agents are well aware of that), the agents assigned to Hitler's protection live in a constant "My God, What Have I Done?" state of mind and are very prone to alcoholism and/or nervous breakdowns.
  • Killing Hitler as a baby means the time traveler goes down as a baby killer because their lack of historical knowledge means they didn't know they could have just killed him during, say, World War I and have a reasonable doubt.
  • While Hitler may be deservedly called evil, he certainly didn't live in a vacuum. Like his own regime, its opponents also exhibited imperialism, racism, ethnic cleansing, militarism, and totalitarianism: Britain and France were also imperialist colonizers, the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state that regularly committed acts of ethnic cleansing, and the American ideology of eugenics and racial segregation inspired Nazi race laws. Hitler certainly took these rotten practices to grotesque extremes, but it doesn't change the fact that his opponents weren't much better. Hitler's actions showed people how horrible racial supremacy was. Had he not existed, the world might have remained a less tolerant place with racism and colonialism still rampant.
• Reconstructed:
  • To Deconstructed 1:
    • Some members of the Time Police are corrupt neo-Nazis who are just using the preservation of history as an excuse not to kill their idol. In fact, the Time Police is also using this to prevent them from changing it themselves.
    • But, knowing that killing Hitler will only take things From Bad to Worse, all the Time Police can do is knuckle down and do their duty.
    • The Time Police aren't just protecting Hitler; they're also protecting his enemies like Roosevelt, Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle. If they die, then it would be just as disastrous if Hitler died, it's that the disasters happen to the Axis instead, and that it would be a utopia for the allies, which, either way, would cause a severe imbalance that must be restored either way.
  • To Deconstructed 2:
    • ...Which is why the time traveler could change their mind and instead do just that. All they needed to do was to try killing him before World War II could start, and check the period first to see whether it did.
    • Or they can appeal to The Needs of the Many to assuage their own conscience, if nobody else's.
  • To Deconstructed 3: A plan to change the world needs a starting point. Destroying the Nazi regime is as good a first step as any. And depending on when in Hitler's regime the traveller lands, it's necessary. Fortunately, Alice the time traveller is Crazy-Prepared with a constitution and a rebuilding plan for post-Nazi Germany.
• Played for Laughs:
  • After killing Hitler, Bob returns to his time and sees that World War II still happened, so he goes back in time to kill the new Nazi leader ... which fails to change anything, so he does it again, and again, and again, until at last he tires of it and stops himself from killing Hitler in the first place.
  • The hero sets things up so that embarrassing footage of Hitler in the bathroom plays during one of his rallies, putting an end to World War II without having to kill him early.
  • Hitler becomes so good at eliminating would-be time travel assassins the Time Police fake his suicide so he can serve as their Token Evil Teammate and prevent worse people than him from causing trouble.
• Played for Drama:
  • A few Holocaust survivors go back in time to kill Hitler and thus save their families and friends among countless others — but it only makes matters worse, making the Axis win WWII.
  • Avigdor and Beulah, two Jewish time travelers, keep trying and failing to kill Hitler before he's committed any of his crimes, which fuels his antisemitism and eventually motivates him to become the genocidal dictator he was. Upon realizing they inadvertently caused Hitler's rise to power and genocidal bigotry, Avigdor and Beulah kill themselves.
  • This fact would break anybody: even if you kill Hitler, the world will still be a sucky place, and killing one bad guy just means that someone else will be waiting in the wings to take his place.
  • While the story does not spell out "you cannot kill Hitler", it's pretty obvious it runs on this rule when the time traveler takes every possible step to make sure they travel to 1943 and ends up in 1888 instead. For further drama points, the traveler is killed in the past, ensuring their efforts were All for Nothing.
• Played for Horror:
  • Each attempt to kill Hitler causes an Alternate Universe in which he escalates his atrocities in retaliation, to the point that the time traveller eventually blows their brains out when they discover that the Nazis wiped out all the inhabitants of France or something similar. In turn this creates yet another timeline or universe, which may be even worse than everything before it.
  • Hitler learns that he cannot be killed without creating something even worse. Consequently, he becomes even bolder and intensifies his regime, believing he has Prophecy Armor for his grand destiny to Take Over the World and destroy all lesser humans.

---

Back to Stalin's Time Travel Exemption Act. ... Huh? Hitler? Wasn't he a failed artist or something?

---