The opening scene of the Doctor Who episode “Let’s Kill Hitler” (Series 6, Episode 8) ends with a secondary character (Melody Pond) holding a handgun and saying to The Doctor, “I’ve got a gun, you’ve got a time machine. What the hell, let’s kill Hitler!”

Aaaaand instead of some serious contemplation of the ethics of killing a person – even someone like Hitler – or The Doctor lecturing on how “You can’t rewrite history! Not one line! Believe me, I know!”, they wind up converting the episode into “Let’s Quickly Shove Hitler Into a Closet, and Spend the Rest of the Episode Doing Character Development”.

It was a real disappointment.

One of the most popular “alternate histories” is that where Germany / The Nazis win the Second World War. It’s justifiable to remind us of the evils of Nazism / fascism, but it’s at the point of being so overdone it’s boring.

What would be more interesting to see would be how WWII or even the rise of Nazism could be avoided in the first place.

What if you could go back in time, and stop Hitler?

If you want to permanently take him out of the action, it’s best to do it when your interference isn’t likely to be noticed. I figure there are four opportunities to do so when you can do it with impunity, or have someone else take the blame.

1. A Casualty of War

Hitler served and fought in The Great War, earning the rank of Corporal and some medals to go with it. From what I’ve read, he loved being in the thick of battle. So it wouldn’t take much to make him just another person killed in the trenches.

After the war, the Nazi Party started without him. Would they have become anything without his leadership? Would the Wiemar Republic have been able to navigate the financial crisis of the Great Depression, or would some other far-right nationalist party have taken over?

Is it moral or ethical to kill someone because of what they might do, but haven’t done yet??

2. Shot in the Putsch

On November 8, 1923, Hitler used his position as de facto leader of the Nazi Party to stage a coup in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. The next day, the authorities gathered enough forces to put a stop to that nonsense. While marching in the streets of Munich, Hitler et al. ran into a line of police who meant business. Shots were fired; the person next to Hitler was killed. The trial (a farce) got Hitler international attention, and began his rise to power.

What if he was one of those shot and killed? Who was next in line in the party hierarchy? Would Hitler have been seen as a martyr to the cause of the National Socialists, or would that have been the end of the Nazi Party?

3. The Beer Hall Time Bomb

On the night of November 7-8, 1939, Georg Elser planted a time bomb in the Munich beer hall where Hitler was scheduled to give his annual speech on the anniversary of the Putsch. Hidden in a pillar next to where the speaker’s platform would be, it was set to go off right in the middle of Hitler’s speech. Unfortunately, Hitler came earlier than expected, and gave a much shorter speech. He (and pretty much everyone else of importance) was well away when the bomb went off.

But with our time travel powers, we can tweak the timing so it doesn’t miss him.

At the time, there hadn’t been much in the way of combat. Germany and the USSR had divided Poland between them – and that was it in Europe. Nothing else would happen for months. Who would have taken over control of Germany, and would they have followed the “Standard Timeline” of the war? What about Italy? They’d allied with Germany, and had already taken over Albania. Everything is up in the air!

4. Operation Valkyrie

The Army tried several times to take out Hitler. On July 20, 1944, they came the closest. If Colonel von Stauffenberg had been able to properly set the charges, if the bomb hadn’t been moved, if Hitler wasn’t bending over the huge, thick, heavy wooden table….

However you want to tinker with it, the big thing is how it would have affected the outcome of the war.

At the time, the US and UK hadn’t yet broken out of Normandy. In the east, the USSR was marching through Poland – the front on July 20 was roughly along a line from Bialystock to Lvov – and the Baltic States hadn’t yet been placed under Soviet domination.

It’s hard to tell how things would have progressed with saner leadership. It’s known that the Germans were far more afraid of the Soviet Army than they were of any of the Western Allies. I like to think that the new regime would have quickly worked out a cease fire in the west, and rushed troops to the east to stop the Soviet advance. Stalin would have been furious, but what could he do? Churchill and Roosevelt would have welcomed the chance to focus their attention on fighting Japan. Germany might have been able to stop the Soviet advance before they got to the German border (or maybe they’d even surrender before that point), which would make the post-war negotiations really interesting. Without a divided Germany, postwar Europe is much, MUCH different.

Same in the Pacific. Would the US and UK have been able to defeat Japan sooner? Perhaps without having to use the atom bomb?

And if you stop WWII (well, at least the War in Europe) before it happens, sure, you save millions of lives, but there are some other things to keep in mind. Rocketry was a hobby that only the German military was taking seriously (it wasn’t covered in the Treaty of Versailles). Without a war to accelerate its development, when would we have landed on the Moon? Computer science (the theory, at least) got a huge boost from British codebreaking efforts…. Other technologies, like radar, got kickstarted thanks to military applications. On the geopolitical side, what about the end of colonialism? Would Israel exist? Would the civil rights movement in the US have been energized if we weren’t hypocritically fighting racism abroad while letting it happen here?

You tell me!