What If There’s A Line to Kill Hitler?

Hence, the line.

Bribe...
Appease...
Offer to help him out in holding back the Russians.

Keeps him reasonably contained on his side of the Rhine.

He and Stalin are still gonna fight eventually...

Well, there wouldn't be a line because every travel coming back would have already created a new branch just by existing in a time period they didn't, even if they touched nothing and did nothing, because the observer effect would have already split off a new timeline. So every time you'd go back, you'd be the first and last to do so.

every explanation of time travel I have heard seems to revolve around light and not matter. You are not going back in time so much as catching up to light from that time. from an energy perspective that would be a lot easier than movinfg matter back in time.

The way I view it is that you would have to undo any and all matter changes that occurred if you wanted to get to a previous time. That would involve knowing all the changes made to arrive at a point in space time where those specifics were in all the opportunities of space and time. When you consider space and time together have the opportunity for all choices to have a possibility to occur you have to realize the unused possibilities of time are so much more vast than space itself. every second of time has an infinite number of infinite possibilities possible that never get used. To get to a certain place in time backwards or forwards would involve making the same decisions, or undoing the decisions made in that order to get to the proper coordinates. Going forwards in time has the combined energy of all existence changing it to the next second. You would have to overcome that energy and then make all those decisions in reverse to go backwards from within the timeline.

Maybe there would be some transdimensional way to do it to travel tot he proper space time coordinates, but even then you would still need to know what all of those choices were in order to know where to travel. In the hitler example you would need to know what second and how hitler died. But you would also need to know if I had a ham sandwich in 1992 because maybe I ate that ham before it went bad on the grocery store shelf and killed Obama.

It is not just hitler that means something, it is every other choice made since then that would be on your path back.

We can't risk altering the timeline, we must adhere to the temporal prime directive.

Well, I mean, you can wave to your future self from where you are right now, and your past self could see if if they were looking in just the right place, so yeah, light is certainly involved. The issue is quantum entanglement and the superposition of all atoms in the universe. There's just no way to know, so everything would be affected the instant you managed to shift things enough to observe the new time you were in. Just by making the attempt, you create a new branch. Hell, by us observing one another positing how to do it, we've already created thousands and thousands of timelines.

I have a time machine. The Time Police won't let any time travelers touch Hitler or his ancestors, aside from the ones who got him in the bunker in 1945. Not sure what happened in the timeline where he didn't "kill himself," but from what I understand, it was pretty bad.

Most of the fun stuff is locked out by the Time Police. The only thing I've managed to do was go back to the early 90s and convince a bunch of film execs to offer the starring role in their genie movie to Shaquille O'Neil instead of Sinbad, and that Kazaam was a much cooler name for a genie than "Shazaam."

Each and every moment for each and every individual ends up being an explosion of infinite possibilities especially when you consider interaction of different wills.

Somewhere in all these interactions is the effect of individual will. For instance you could isolate a group of hydrogen atoms and if you knew all the energies of the group without any other input you could predict what they do. At some point the physical reactions get mixed with an actual decision of consciousness. If I chose to go left or right a result of a complex series of physical energies that I made a predictable reaction to, or did I chose to go right because some force of will outside the physical force of the universe chose to make this blob of atoms go right?

That is the thing about time as a dimension that IMO exists. An area of space may have a huge amount of particles interacting within it, or it may have relatively nothing going on. But it has the opportunity to have anything on that scale within it. For instance a cubic mm of the sun compared with a cubic MM of earth's atmosphere, or a cubic MM of space are much different, but all have the opportunity as coordinates to have whatever is in the other. Time expands on that by creating infinite frames of space where different things are occurring. That fabric seems to operate on it's own densities and relative differences spawning countless infinities of possibilities.

Such a vast realm of coordinates seems to have escaped the contemplation of many sci-fi writers who play with time travel. The ideas of infinite multiverses are really simplified by things like comic books.

So I guess you know who nailed a Hebrew carpenter to wood then

Are you a secret Nazi? Fuck that shit.

Even assuming that Hitler's susceptible to that, this is one of those situations where you might not get a second chance. Worse yet, what if you inadvertently cause Hitler to be more capable at committing genocide? Do you want to be the guy who has to say, "Yeah, I could have killed Hitler, instead I actually enabled him to do a better job, which means that in the timeline I created, he killed several million more people. But, hey, these things happen, right?"

Better to be 100% certain that he can't harm anyone than run the risk of him even harming a tenth of the people he ultimately did.

Why would I use my time machine for boring stuff like watching Jesus when I can use it for stuff like telling a marketing team that "Jiffy" is a stupid name for peanut butter, and they should just call it "Jif" instead? Or altering immigration forms for some people named "Berenstein" and changing their name to "Berenstain"? Or pointing out to another marketing team that if it's spelled "Froot Loops," they can use twice as many cereal pieces in the logo?

Why fuck with historical events when I can do more worthwhile things like making slight changes to commercial products?

I like that! Apparently she was kind of prone to antisemitic utterances every now and then, so maybe we can have them bond over that, while our protagonist is wincing, starting to doubt his plan. Are there more historical figures we can throw in the mix? If we're going for ahistorical trashy Movie anyways, might as well go all in!

You have Sigmund Freud, who was Gustav Mahler's shrink, so you have the pyschiatric world of turn-of-the-century Europe. You have the music scene the Mahler's were involved with, and the infighting and intrigue that that involved (Mahler chapioned Anton Bruckner's music, which was not well received outside Mahler's help -- but is considered a vital part of the Classical Canon now).
You have, of course, the European politics permeating through, as the powder keg of WWI was only a few years from going off.
I don't know much about the art scene in Vienna, but as Hitler was there, he'd be on its periphery at the very least, so comparisons to other artists could be valid, especially as the protagonist (and I hate to say this, but likely to be a male because of Europe's social norms at the time, but I suspect there is a way to make the protag a woman) is trying to prop Hitler up as a client.

no... I'm trying to work with the options present to someone like Neville Chamberlain at the time, and taking into account what was going on with the rest of the world at the time.

Are you some secret Stalinist? Should he have just been left free to roll over Scandinavia?

How come the go-to Number One Time-Traveler Moral Obligation is always "stop Hitler" and not "prevent colonization" or "prevent the African slave trade"? Those seem worse in a lot of ways, and would probably change Europe enough that Hitler might not rise to power in the first place.

To do that, we have to ensure Constantinople doesn't fall to the Ottomans.
That would keep Europe from having to find alternate ways to trade with the East, and thus funding expeditions that directly led to colonization and the slave triangle, and keep Europe's influence in Asia at bay for the lack of silver found in the New World.
In order to do that, there might be a need to find a way to mitigate the various plagues that whittled down the Roman, er, Byzantine Empire and brought about the Ottoman's success. But then you still have to deal with Roman Colonization in the Middle East and Egypt.

What’s his name, Scott something or other, the Mormon guy who did the book that they made into a movie with Harrison Ford that for years people wanted to see and then they found out that the author was a homophobe so it didn’t do all that well in theaters. That guy, he wrote a book about people traveling back to America in 1480 to advance native cultures up to parity with European nations before Columbus shows up. I read it, it was okay.

Scott Carr?

Orson Scott Card.
Brought that up here actually.

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3478429/

Right, thanks.

it's the clearest single thing to tackle rather than going backwards?
I mean if you want to prevent Hitler, save the Archduke in 1914 by taking an anarchist out for coffee at the right moment. No WW1, no list of grievances for him to exploit in his rise to power.

The thread is about Hitler, not Stalin. When you're preferred counterfactual is to "offer to help him out", you've gone wrong. Hitler could have been confronted in the years before the Munich Agreement. At that point the German military was already too strong, and the logic of Nazism led inevitably to war in the east.

if you want to stop hitler, go back and slap some sense into Eve and give that pesky snake a dressing down.

Dan Carlin often talks about the Great Man theory of history vs. the Trends and Forces theory of history. I'd say they're not mutually exclusive, and it's a whole lot easier for a time traveller to stop an important man vs stopping a trend or geopolitical force. Hitler's a real obvious man to take out. Ditto the dude who started the Boxer Rebellion. Maaaaaybe Lenin too, but honestly it's hard not to see a different person taking up Stalin or Mao's mantle. Taking out someone like Columbus is somewhere in the middle. He was a pretty horrible dude *in his own time* so if he'd died between when land was sighted and when they actually landed in the Caribbean, it might have set a very different tone for Spanish expansion; Isabella's edict that Indians were people likely would have been taken more seriously, for instance. Of course, the spread of smallpox would still have happened. Preventing Columbus from sailing in the first place might have caused more and bloodier wars to the east, or what Bickendan said. There's a whole lot more to preventing colonization of the New World (which is really what it would have taken to prevent the Atlantic slave trade) than there is to preventing the Holocaust.

yes, because he evolved in a vacuum and there was NOTHING ELSE going on in the world. No Japanese sphere of influence increasing, no Italy trying it's damnedest to get the crumbs of the African pie... No common perception that Stalin was a bigger threat (and amazingly, still turned out to be a bit of a problem afterwards).

(Also, who said anything about "preferred"? I went with the most efficient way to prevent the invasion of Poland and the kicking off of WW2 for France, Britain, and the commonwealth [other than those chicken shit Irish collaborators], and you-out of nowhere I should add-decide I'm a nazi symp?

Jayzus...

So tell us, how would you have confronted him between 1933-37? Bury your head in the sand?

You've essentially suggested an alliance with Nazi Germany. That that might qualify you as being a 'Nazi symp' ought not to surprise you. Obviously your other posting history doesn't indicate anything of the sort so the most likely explanation is that you're very confused.

The problem with your finding "the most efficient way to prevent the invasion of Poland" is that firstly, you haven't suggested anything likely to achieve that. And secondly that the Soviets weren't a credible threat to Germany in the 1930s, so while Stalin was also a very bad man I'm not sure why some sort of anti-Soviet front would have done other than to embolden Hitler further.

In terms of what I suggest myself, the following might have helped prevent WW2:

• Arrest the spread of fascism by providing proper support for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
• React more aggressively to German re-armament in the 1930s, in violation of treaty obligations - economically and militarily if necessary.
• Prevent the Nazis from re-militarising the Rhineland (across the border with France) in 1936.
• Ensure that there are consequences for all of the pogroms and other oppressive internal measures. No Berlin Olympics etc.

And obviously, while it was already too late at this stage to prevent a war:

• Don't sell out Czechoslovakia at Munich.
• Actually fucking do something when Germany invade Poland.

And that's only if we're talking about the western allies. It's quite certain that there were Germans in a position to stop Hitler coming to power at all, particularly the industrialists who bankrolled him...

considering how much of Poland was carved partly out of Germany as a result of WW1 from Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, a territorial compromise might have a chance. Likewise, there'd still be space to create a corridor to the Baltic for Poland further east as a buffer to Russia/USSR.

who could react during the rearming? everyone was behind them modernization-wise. The soviets were still the most credible (non) threat to Germany, along with Poland, Finalnd, and the Baltic states.

part of the reason I brought Japan's activities into the topic was because history shows how trade sanctions worked out there... Little reason to believe that starving Germany out wouldn't have resulted in their starting shit even sooner than they did-when the allies were even less prepared.

maintaining a DMZ along the Rhine might have been possible as a trade off... although it'd probably have meant pulling French forces back from the Maginot line.

Pogroms and internal oppression-yeah, the world was looking at Stalin at the time as being a much badder man. Better to put the two most belligerent in a position to fight each other than draw the rest of the world in. Let Hitler be emboldened to launch the invasion of Russia without the delay of the Molotov- von Ribbontrop agreement. If Germany had gone east rather than west (y'know... in response to the Saar offensive by France in their treaty support of Poland) then at the very least the west would've had a year or so more to prepare.

No, it wouldn't. That's exactly what they tried with Czechoslovakia, and Hitler broke that deal. Why would you expect him to honour a similar one with regard to Poland?

You have your history very confused, as I suspected.

Allied militaries may not have been fully modernised in the 1930s, but they were still large, as befitted major world powers.
Until the late 1930s, the German military was tiny, as had been required by the Versailles Treaty. They could have easily been overturned by Britain and France up until about 1937 and were certainly in no position to "start shit even sooner". When they reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, they had a few thousand troops there - against a couple of hundred thousand French just over the border. The French didn't respond for diplomatic reasons - but they should have.

The Soviet military was a joke until well into WW2 with basically no ability to project power, as shown by the Winter War. Your attempt to focus on them as a threat to Germany is misguided.

A DMZ is not a proposal. There was a DMZ - on the German side of the border. Are you unaware of that?

funny, I was thinking the same. not too mention the language... I said maintain an existing DMZ, and you tell me I'm wrong because it existed?

I guess the difference is that I didn't enter a thought experiment with personal attacks, let alone continue them.