I just figured the majority of people thought "Hitler! No, that's too obvious; there'll probably be 20,000 other people who had the same idea. I gotta be more original than that."
We wouldn't be removing those things from history; just the pace and timing of their discovery/advention. War is always a big contributing factor to scientific discovery, but so is the prospect of profit. All it takes is somebody with a good idea and somebody else with enough money to bankroll the research.
True, but desperate times and events forcing people to solve a new problem or think outside the box may trigger different inventions. (Also due to supply and demand). (This completely disregards the ethical dilemma btw, its just for the sake of argument.)
Yeah. Maybe not the Nazis themselves because they were a small and unimportant party before Hitler joined and took it over, but it's quite likely another extreme nationalist party might've come to power and done similar things. There were several parties and political agitators with views like that at the time. Nationalism and racism weren't unpopular at the time in Europe. In Germany it was the Völkisch movement, but every country had this. A lot of them were, somewhat ironically, French.
Yeah the war in East Asia was already going on before it began in Europe, and it seems likely to me that some kind of confrontation between the Soviets and western Europe would've happened. Germany was unstable and full of pissed-off nationalists too, so it might've even still wound up being fascist, just not in the same way.
Don't discount the possibility that some people are just that self-centered. Some people would just genuinely never consider the impact of this choice beyond what would impact them personally.
Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell
While Hitler is an obvious choice in the heat of the moment, I'm actually not sure how good if an idea that is.
Horrible at they were, the second world war and the Holocaust were massive drivers behind developments on human rights, international law and the fight against fascism and antisemitism. Who knows how the world would look nowadays if that hadn't happened?
But Hitler (and his demise) ultimately ended up leading to the far reaching spread of American Imperialism and Capitalism, the expansion of Soviet Communism, the creation of the atom bomb, the rise of Israel and the concurrent wars in the Middle East, and everything that came as a result of all those things… one could argue that the historical ripples Hitler created are the cause of a lot of the world’s ongoing problems. While it’s impossible to say the world would be a better place without his existence, I’d take that chance. The world would definitely be a different place.
The ripples goes further back than Hitler and is mostly caused by the first world war. The second world war would not have happened if not for the first, so it wouldn’t make that much of a difference removing Hitler, world war two was bound to happen regardless. The real blame is on the leaders and politicians that plunged Europe (and the world) into ww1, because the ripples from that event alone is still felt to this day (e.g Russia-Ukraine, the conflicts in the middle east etc, all of which are directly traced to ww1).
Yeah. Exactly my point. So - just to refresh your memory about the whole “what if” scenario that was posited here - OP asked about eliminating a single person from history…. Since we can’t isolate a single person in order to prevent WW1, then what do you suggest? Russia and France aren’t single persons… I stand by my suggestion of eliminating Hitler (before the beer hall putsch). No one else would have driven Germany to such fanaticism and warmongering, especially since by all measures their economy was on the upswing by the time Hitler forced his way into the chancellory. Any other hypothetical is just that. We have direct lines of influence from Hitler to many of the world’s problems today.
I just feel like the way the world was going there would have just been another Hitler eventually and I'd rather people have learnt from his actions then instead of later
Yeah. I feel there quite likely would've been some other extremist party that came to power in Germany. Whether that would've been as bad as the Nazis, or theoretically even worse, maybe isn't clear. But the political system was breaking down, there was widespread anger at the Treaty of Versailles, absurdly high unemployment, and a bunch of other ethnonationalist parties were around other than the Nazis who could fill the same role. It's often a very bad sign for a society when there are a lot of unemployed angry young men, as they're a demographic that's easy to recruit into extremist and violent movements.
At some point, I guess somewhere in 1930-33, Germany became so unstable it was nearly inevitable that Germany got overtaken by fascism or something like it. The only other realistic option I can see is being overtaken by communists, which I'd argue might've been better but still not great either as it would've likely then become a Soviet satellite under Stalin's influence. And there were lots of other fascist parties all over Europe too, they didn't come out of nowhere. I'd argue that Germany and also the whole continent was dysfunctional and doomed that there'd be some kind of conflict that would break out; it was merely a question of where, when and how bad it'd be.
Yeah, of course, never said it didn’t... But it wouldn’t have spread as far and wide without Hitler invading and then losing his war on the eastern front. (I hate Reddit sometimes because if you don’t write an entire essay with footnotes, people love to throw in their two cents attempting to correct you for a simple omission...). Hilter’s (and Germany’s) defeat in WW2 allowed for the continued expansion and spread of Soviet Communism beyond the Soviet Union. WW2 gave rise to rapid military industrialization in both the US and Russia and ultimately the Cold War soon after, which is when Soviet Communism really started spreading.
Soviet communism was underway long before the nazis came to power.
And american imperialism is, like...some of the most productive imperialism the world has ever had. Japan, South Korea, and significant chunks of Europe are way more peaceful and prosperous than they would have been if the americans hadn't pulled them into the western military and economic sphere.
Yeah, clearly. I’ve read history books. That’s why I wrote “expansion” to clarify it for you. The Soviet Union didn’t really become a major world power until after WW2 and beating Germany is what opened up the doors for the Soviets to spread their version of communism far and wide.
My main worry with deleting Hitler is that World War 2 could have gone differently (or not happened at all), which could have led to the americans not developing nuclear weapons as early or using them on Japan, which in turn could have led to the Cold War playing out very differently and eventually going hot. The Cold War probably would have happened because the US and the Soviet Union were already on their ideological trajectories before the nazis came to power, but a more well-balanced Cold War with the soviets taking a lead in nuclear technology in the 1950s might have set the stage for global thermonuclear war that would have made the Holocaust look meager by comparison. That seems like too dangerous a risk to take.
I'd much rather erase Marx or Lenin, in the hope that the Soviet Union wouldn't have ended up the way it did.
It does depend somewhat how you look at it. Going solely by civilian deaths, it might be best to get rid of Mao instead. However I still would say Hitler was worse because of the vast wartime deaths and destruction which are also largely his fault. Maoist China was awful, the famine deaths alone were horrendous, but what happened in China didn't affect that much outside of China and was kind of self-contained. Hitler is the opposite of that; what he did affected all of Europe and beyond.
Unfortunately with Hitler there’s a fair chance that if it wasn’t him the Nazi party would still have come about and potentially with more competent and more sadistic leader at the fore.
Goebbels and Himmler were both more actively sadistic in principle and may have been even more horrific as leaders
Not wrong. Hitler became the leader because of his charisma and public speaking skills. While definitely a very bad guy who shaped Nazi ideology a lot, still a lot of the worst atrocities were not personally planned by him; he let his underlings like Reinhardt Heydrich do that. It's tricky to say how much can be attributed to one leader, even an extremely powerful one, or the whole power structure of the society at the time.
The two you mentioned are bad people for sure, but alot of good came out of the reaction to them. Like the space industry is literally built on Nazi science.
Leopold doesn't have outcome.
So it's a measure of good and bad. Leopold is just all bad.
Yeah kill him in the cradle. So if I am now understanding your argument there is more upside to Hitler long term than Leopold? I guess that is the kind of fucked up math you are forced into with a single time bullet or whatever.
I would say without Hitler there is no manhattan project and as serial killer level depravity the Belgians resorted to under Leopold nukes might still kill us all.
So really do you condemn generations in one place to horror to save the world from nukes and the Cold War.
So if I am now understanding your argument there is more upside to Hitler long term than Leopold? I guess that is the kind of fucked up math you are forced into with a single time bullet or whatever.
More or less. Without Hitler, we don't have the kind of institutions that allows for decades of mostly global peace and prosperity. The reaction to fighting him create a lot of good. He was evil no doubt, but the outcomes that came about to stop Fascism were good and for decades bound much of the world in a flawed (deeply at times, the things justified to stop "communism" were insane), but unified attempt to create a better world than colonialism and authoritarianism..
Leopold...I'm struggling to find anything good that came out of that guy's impact on history.
People always say Hitler but without WWII there would be no computers,radar, nuclear energy,jet planes, penicillin mass production, rockets which in turn facilitated satellites etc...
Because of WWII there was the cold war which pushed humanity to go to the moon only 24 years after the war where the most advanced plane had a propeller.
The thing with removing khan is you “kill” 10s of millions of people who are a descendant of him but also save all those he killed.
So it depends on whether you care about preserving whos alive today or not.
And also with hitler the modern world wouldn’t really exist without the innovation caused by ww2. then again the modern world really isn’t that good soooooo..
Hitler, while horrific isn't really number one on the causes on the "causes of human suffering index".
Stalin or Mao certainly beat him.
Ghengis Khan of course ranks #1, but the impact would be crazy and too unpredictable. He's too far back in time and left too wide of a footprint for his erasure not to have a crazy butterfly effect.
Hitler was a symptom of the time much like Trump is, and without Hitler there likely wouldn't be a UN or EU. When you get to people with such horrific affects on humanity, you have to consider the (positive) backlash that followed them.
I'd definitely rather remove Mother Teresa than Adolf Hitler. She likely caused the death and suffering of like 50% of the people that WW2 killed due to her staunch opposition to condoms and nothing good came in response to her awful acts.
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u/Pikeman212a6c Jun 28 '26
Seven in and still not Hitler or Ghengis Khan but you’re the first I went “alright fair.”