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. 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. 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. In Robert Asprin's Time Scout series, people important to history can't be killed.
There's no real explanation, but you'll trip, or sneeze, or die, or your gun will jam, or something, but you will fail. 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).
Hitler used an attack upon a radio station at Gleiwitz, on the German border , as a pretext in order to attack Poland. The invasion had been carefully planned and was directed from the Reich territory and from Pomerania by two armored forces, which carried out a pincer movement in order to surround the insufficiently armed Polish troops. The German combat techniques and strategic choices made this first campaign a deadly war. Civilians were a potential target from the beginning, either through the bombing of urban and industrial centers, or though the aggressive practices of the German infantry. For example, it was in this context that the Einsatzgruppen carried out their first killings. These mobile groups were composed of policemen, as well as political police and intelligence officers and were officially in charge of "securing" the invaded territories.
Shot entirely in one afternoon, the video features both Horn and Downes and begins with a young girl sitting in front of a radio. A black-and-white shot of Horn singing into a radio-era microphone is then superimposed before th radio blows up as the track reaches the first chorus. In the second verse, the young girl is seen transported into the future, where she meets Horn and a silver-jumpsuited female in a test tube. 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. "The Einstein Gun" is set in a world where Franz Ferdinand is never assassinated, because the assassin'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.
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 wouldn't happen. The resulting clusterfuck takes up the bulk of Time Ghost's main plot as this goes very, very, very wrong.
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.
The spring 1934 crisis was also a sign of the rise of the SS's power, as well as that of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. They were implementing a strategy involving the takeover of the political police forces of the different Länder, and instrumentalization of the SD to establish their control of the repressive apparatuses. Heydrich and Himmler, who were initially only in charge of the Bay Po Po , acquired command of the Gestapo, the Prussian political police, following the "Röhm's Putsch," gaining de facto control of almost all the German political and criminal police forces. During the same period, the SS took control of all the concentration camps in Germany, and Himmler appointed the Dachau camp commander, Theodor Eicke, as Inspector of the concentration camps . The SS then controlled the police and the concentration camps, and established itself as the main protagonist of Nazi repression policies (Frei, 1994; Herbert, 1996; Bessel, 1984).
There are significant differences between the testimony given to a prosecutor, an oral history or interview given to a journalist or historian, and a memoir. The narrator tailors her story to meet the expectations of the listener, and that story may change over time as the narrator learns more about her past from other sources and as the questions of the audience change. Oral histories published in the late 1980s, for example, do not show the same sensitivity to the events of the Holocaust as memoirs published in the early twenty-first century. The more recent memoirs often attempt to deal with the question of knowledge and participation, since the female witness anticipates that the reader or listener will ask her, "What did you know about the persecution of the Jews? " Furthermore, memoirs—usually penned by the elderly—are often a collaborative project shared by a parent and her descendants. Sometimes the language in these accounts is coded, or only hints are given.
In several cases I benefited from direct contact with the memoirist and was able to ask for more details. The history of the Holocaust is wrapped up in the Nazi imperial conquest of eastern Europe, which mobilized all Germans. In Nazi-speak, being part of the Volksgemeinschaft, or People's Community, meant participating in all the campaigns of the Reich, including the Holocaust. The most powerful agencies, starting with the SS and police, were the main executors; these agencies were controlled by men but also staffed by women. In the government hierarchies, female professionals and spouses attached themselves to men of power and in turn wielded considerable power themselves, including over the lives of the regime's most vulnerable subjects. Women who were assigned to military support positions to free up men for the front had the authority to issue orders to subordinates.
These women filled positions in the Nazi hierarchy from the very bottom to the very top. All German women were required to work and contribute to the war effort, in paid and unpaid positions. They managed fatherless households, family farms, and businesses. They dominated in the field of agriculture and in the white-collar "female" professions of nursing and secretarial work. Some twenty-five to thirty percent of the teachers in Weimar and Nazi Germany were women.
As the Reich's terror apparatus expanded, new career tracks opened for women, including employment in concentration camps. While the careers and acts of female camp guards have been scrutinized by journalists and scholars, much less is known about women occupying traditional female roles—women not trained to be cruel—who by chance or design ended up serving the criminal policies of the regime. Appalled by the violence of the war and the Holocaust, most female witnesses found ways to distance themselves from it and to minimize their roles as agents of a criminal regime. But for the thirty thousand women certified by Himmler's SS and police as auxiliaries in gendarme offices, Gestapo headquarters, and prisons, psychological distancing was hardly an option, and the likelihood of direct participation in mass murder was high. In the civil administration of Nazi colonial governors and commissioners, another ten thousand secretaries were spread out across the Nazis' eastern capitals and district offices in Rovno , Kiev, Lida, Reval , Grodno, Warsaw, and Radom.
These offices were responsible for the dispensation of indigenous populations, including Jews, many of whom had been placed in ghettos and forced-labor assignments managed by these German male and female bureaucrats. Often they were mothers, girlfriends, and wives who joined their sons and mates in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and Russia. Hitler's Furies were zealous administrators, robbers, tormentors, and murderers in the bloodlands. They melded into hundreds of thousands—at least half a million—women who went east. The sheer numbers alone establish the significance of German women in the Nazi system of genocidal warfare and imperial rule.
The German Red Cross trained six hundred forty thousand women during the Nazi era, and some four hundred thousand were placed in wartime service; the majority of these were sent to the rear areas or near the battle zones in the eastern territories. They worked in field hospitals of the army and Waffen-SS, on train platforms serving refreshments to soldiers and refugees, in hundreds of soldiers' homes socializing with German troops in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the Baltics. The German army trained over five hundred thousand young women in support positions—as radio operators, file-card keepers, flight recorders, and wiretappers—and two hundred thousand of these served in the East.
Secretaries organized, tracked, and distributed the massive supplies necessary to keep the war machine running. Myriad organizations sponsored by the Nazi Party and Himmler's Race and Resettlement Office deployed German women and girls as social workers, racial examiners, resettlement advisors, educators, and teaching aides. In one region of annexed Poland that was a laboratory for "Germanization," Nazi leaders deployed thousands of teachers. Hundreds more—including the young teachers mentioned in the files I found in Zhytomyr—were sent to other colonial enclaves of the Reich. As agents of Nazi empire-building, these women were assigned the constructive work of the German "civilizing" process. Yet the destructive and constructive practices of Nazi conquest and occupation were inseparable.
Recorded cases of female killers were to a degree representative of a much bigger phenomenon that had been suppressed, overlooked, and under-researched. Though the documented cases of direct killing are not numerous, they must be taken very seriously and not dismissed as anomalies. They believed that their violent deeds were justified acts of revenge meted out to enemies of the Reich; such deeds were, in their minds, expressions of loyalty. To Erna Petri, even helpless Jewish boys fleeing from a boxcar bound for the gas chamber were not innocent; they were the ones who almost got away.
Invoked in Rick and Morty, where 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. This ends up alerting the Time Police, who then go back in time to stop them from becoming sapient in the first place. 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 .
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. 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.
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" 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. 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.
One of the main characters in Sergey Lukyanenko's novel Dances on the Snow 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.
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. 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. _ C – In the Government-General, the main regional extermination program was designed by Odilo Globocnick, the supreme leader of the police and the SS, presumably in autumn 1941.
The program led to the near-total extermination of the Jewish population of Poland in gas chambers which used carbon monoxyde. In the summer of 1942, the expansion of the extermination facilities and the adoption of Zyklon B gas technology were considered for a time, then dropped. The music video for "Video Killed the Radio Star", written, directed and edited by Australian Russell Mulcahy, was produced on a budget of $50,000. It was filmed in only a day in South London, and was edited in a couple of days. Mulcahy asked Virginia Hey, a friend who was a model and aspiring actress, to dress "in a silver costume and be lowered via wires in a test tube." There were about 30 takes required for shots of the actress in the tube. The tube falls over in the video, although Mulcahy claims it was not intended to be shown in the final edit.
Hans Zimmer can be briefly seen wearing black playing a keyboard, and Debi Doss and Linda Jardim, who provided the female vocals for the song, are also seen. Through all this, the carpenter stuck to his story, and eventually the Gestapo gave up and packed him off to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp. Strange to say, Elser was not executed or even badly treated there; although held in solitary confinement, he was allowed a bench and his tools, and kept alive until the last month of the war. It is generally supposed that Hitler wanted him alive to star in a war crimes trial in which he would have implicated the British in the Munich plot. The dramatic stories of these women reveal the darkest side of female activism. They show what can happen when women of varied backgrounds and professions are mobilized for war and acquiesce in genocide.
Women with official roles in Hitler's Reich—such as Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the top woman in the Nazi Party—may have been highly visible, but they were largely figureheads, wielding little political power in the formal sense. The contribution of other women in numerous other roles has, in contrast, gone largely unacknowledged and unexplored. This historical blind spot is especially glaring in regard to women in the occupied eastern territories. As self-proclaimed superior rulers, German women in the Nazi East wielded unprecedented power over those designated "subhuman"; they were given a license to abuse and even kill those who were perceived, as one secretary near Minsk said after the war, as the scum of society. These women had proximity to power in the massive state-run machinery of destruction.
They also had proximity to the crime scenes; there was no great distance between the settings of small towns, where women went about their daily routines, and the horrors of ghettos, camps, and mass executions. 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 . 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 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 are Hitler. He also warns you not to kill him if you meet him during the tests. 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. This trope is the basic premise of Kamen Rider Zi-O, as it has time-travelers 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.
