Discussion Main / HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Duplicate Trope, started by TrickyTroper on Mar 24th 2015 at 10:50:49 PM

Under the Literature section: "In 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"."

Does anyone remember the title of this book? I have been searching for it for 20 years. I checked it out of a library in the early 90's and have never been able to locate it again.

A couple of other things I recall from it are socks disappearing because dryers vibrate on the same frequency as wormholes and a historian traveling back in time to prevent the death of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville actually causing his death by shouting to the general at the wrong time.

The whole idea is based on the central notion that someone wants to prevent WW 2 and all its highlights by killing Hitler. Why wouldn't someone take an entirely different approach, like rigging history so that Hitler gets accepted into art school?

Is there a version of this trope when applied to other people/characters? Something like "Big Bad's Time Travel Exemption Act"? Or is this trope the catch-all?

Is there a better way to rewrite the last scenario of the Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act? The Abusive Parent situation seems too vague for this. I've read the story where a Time Traveler's assassination attempt on Hitler in his childhood inadvertently caused the Antisemitism to arise in Hitler and I think it's a better example for the last scenario.

Any time between the start of the war and the point where a sane German leadership would have surrendered, killing Hitler is probably the worst thing you could do. He didn't overrun the British Expeditionary Force before they could evacuate from Dunkirk. He didn't retreat armies from North Africa or Stalingrad when his generals told him to. He wasted huge amounts of resources on super-weapons which never deployed in significant number, instead of on deploying huge numbers of good-enough-weapons, as the allies did. He invaded Russia in winter.

On the other hand, I'm reliably informed there is a consensus among historians for "No Hitler, no holocaust".

Doctor Who describes things like this perfectly, as fixed points in the timeline... Why do I mention this?

It's very likely that Hitler himself is such a point. (Seriously, the effects that man has had. And they're not all negative, for the record. If it wasn't for him, we'd probably not even HAVE many of the things we do because of the technology developed during the space race... That race might not even have been possible for a number of years if it wasn't for him.)

I'm suddenly reminded of a story idea I had once for an agency that watches for time travelers come to interfere with/observe the past, and hunt them down with extreme prejudice. The agency was born out of a segment of German police from the first half of the 20th century who had to fend off attempts to murder Hitler on a regular basis (very much like, and not entirely uninspired by, the Subnormality comic excerpted on the main page for this trope).

I don't see how killing Hitler would affect Japan's warpath at all. The A-bomb and millions of deaths might still happen. Also historians debate whether World War II would have happened even if Hitler had lost the election.