Baby Hitler
by Rachel MacNair
There’s a “thought experiment” prevalent enough to have its own Wikipedia entry: if you had a time machine and could go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby, on the idea that millions of killings would thus be prevented, would you do it? In 2015, The New York Times surveyed its readers asking if they would kill baby Hitler. Response:
- 42% yes
- 30% no
- 28% undecided
This idea has kicked off debates on ethics and philosophy (plus of course some speculation on the practicalities of changing the past, which we won’t cover here).
I consider three aspects relevant to the consistent life ethic, ending with why a mere fantasy matters at all.
Why Kill Baby HITLER?
The Military Mindset
In 2016, this question came up during the U.S. Republican presidential primary debates, and Jeb Bush responded “Hell yeah, I would!” Considering potential unknown consequences, he said he still would, because “You gotta step up, man.” He got a lot of support for this position.
The point has explored by science fiction writers, where having a time traveler go back to the 1890s fits the genre. Two of interest:
- a 2002 episode of The Twilight Zone, “Cradle of Darkness.”
A woman travels back, succeeds in killing baby Hitler, so Hitler’s mother adopts a different baby and history turns out the same.
- a 1996 novel, Making History, by Stephen Fry
This avoids killing by having the time traveler render Hitler’s father Alois infertile before he’s conceived. But a different Nazi dictator fills the slot that Adolf left empty by not existing, and he was more effective – he got the German scientists to be willing to make nuclear weapons, conquered Europe, and did a more total job of exterminating Jews.
That last thought had certainly occurred to me before I read about it. You could get someone worse than Hitler. How could you get someone even worse? Easy – someone who wrote a better book, fooled people better, didn’t use astrology for military planning, etc.
The thing is, the society was set up for Naziism to develop. World War I, resentment of the Versailles Treaty and occupation of the Ruhr, hyperinflation, and a long list of other things were putting people in the mood. If society weren’t ready, Hitler would have spun himself out and gotten nowhere. If society were ready, then if Hitler weren’t there to do it, someone else would have taken over the slot. The reason they didn’t do it was that Hitler had already taken it.
So the premise of the whole question is based on the military assumption that if you can just get rid of specific leaders, the whole thing falls apart. That’s as unrealistic here as it is in other situations.
Why Kill BABY Hitler?
The Abortion/Infanticide Mindset
At the 2019 March for Life, Ben Shapiro was asked about the thought experiment and replied:
The truth is that no pro-life person on earth would kill baby Hitler, because baby Hitler wasn’t Hitler, adult Hitler was Hitler. Baby Hitler was a baby . . .
What you presumably want to do with baby Hitler is take baby Hitler out of baby Hitler’s house and move baby Hitler into a better house where he would not grow up to be Hitler, right? That’s the idea.
In response, three companies pulled their ads from his podcast. Oh, dear.
But it goes beyond his clear exposition of a proper pro-life response. The question I most want to know is: if we’re resolving an ethical dilemma in favor of killing, and we somehow magically know that we’re not making things even worse, but at least a little better – once all that magic has been posited, why are people intent on killing him as a baby?
There’s no reason to think he wasn’t a perfectly fine baby. Or that he didn’t grow up to be as good a child as his siblings and other contemporaries. We don’t know of him committing violence before becoming a soldier in World War I. Even then, there’s no reason to think he was any worse than other soldiers. Given all the scrutiny and animosity focused on him, if there were any evidence he had been above-average in viciousness, we would surely have heard about it.
Still, if we’re strategizing within the thought experiment and assume for the sake of argument that killing him is OK, why on earth not wait until he was a soldier? Arranging for him to get killed in the war would probably be easier for the future-knowing time traveler to do and not get caught at. Then Hitler would just be one of the over two million German soldiers killed in that war. That’s just as much a disappearance for the sake of keeping him from his role in Naziism, and at least you’ve allowed him to have some life at pre-soldier times when his living is no danger to others.
But so many don’t get that far because there’s such a strong bigotry about people that “shouldn’t exist.” We start that bigotry at the beginning. This gets especially vicious nowadays when people aim the hostility at babies who’ve been conceived in rape.
Why KILL Baby Hitler?
The Violence-as-Problem-Solver Mindset
People like Stephen Colbert and John C. Reilly have taken a position similar to Shapiro’s, that getting Hitler into a loving home was a better alternative.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t know that his upbringing was the main problem. He was a soldier in World War I. He volunteered in August 1914 and was lance corporal in the Bavarian Army. He got the Iron Cross for bravery and was wounded in action.
It seems reasonable to me to think this influenced his ideology far more than just his upbringing. That along with the observation that large numbers of other people were impacted the same way by both the war and longstanding pro-military attitudes and bigotries against Jews, etc.
Of course, the biggy for stopping Naziism would have been to stop World War I. Heaven knows there were peace activists at the time who tried. But they didn’t have the time-traveler’s knowledge of what was going to happen (which the traveler has because from the traveler’s point of view it already had). Stopping the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that triggered the war could be done by distracting or bumping into the assassin without harming even him. Actually, it was so arbitrary that it could be done even more simply by having the driver of the Archduke’s car not take a wrong turn – exactly the kind of thing a time traveler’s intervention would be good for. That would have the moral advantage of preventing a murder rather than causing one.
It would still have the danger that, given what a powder keg Europe was at the time, a delay with a different trigger might have made things worse. It’s a good thing all this is a magical thought experiment. We don’t have to find out.
Also, stopping the various humiliations of Germany after World War I would help. But there were peace activists at the time who were trying. I don’t see how a time traveler’s knowledge would have an advantage over them. (A Quaker friend of mine took issue with me on this: he thinks of convincing the people negotiating the Treaty of Versailles that one is a time traveler who really does know the future and showing it to them. Well, sure. That’s as good a fantasy as any.)
So perhaps we’re stuck with seeing what we can do about getting Hitler out of the loop. Let’s say we’re doing it with magical knowledge that it will at least help, and not put a more vicious and effective dictator in his place.
Here his ambitions as an artist provide a prime opportunity. He made clear on different occasions that being an artist was really what he most wanted. He failed to gain entry into his desired art school twice.
The time traveler has that knowledge, and could go back and give him some tutoring to help him to pass the exam and get in. Or lobby the examiners, or whatever it took – preparation by studying the situation would be needed.
That was before World War I, but if he’d had a spot at the school, or had launched a career because of it, he may well have gone back to that and left his Naziism-launching spot unfilled.
All of which is still complete fantasy. We’ll never be able to run this as a real-life experiment to see how it would have worked out.
Conclusion
As long as we have thought experiments and fantasies, why aren’t we thinking in those helpful terms, instead of in terms of killing? If the point is to make someone absent from a place, why think in terms of death rather than in terms of something more beneficial?
Violence starts in the mind. If we want to stop it, I say we need even our fantasies to be more mature about what violence can and can’t do. We should be more eager to find the real need that violence is proposed to address, and find better and healthier ways of addressing that need.
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For more posts on speculations about changing history, see:
Would Nonviolence Work on the Nazis?
The Civil War Conundrum, 150 Years Later
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