I am inclined to think that killing infant Hitler is the right utilitarian thing to do. It is certainly an obvious, defining feature of Hitler’s career that German society missed dozens of opportunities to thwart him: this is the whole reason we ask the baby Hitler question. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party succeeded more or less to the precise degree Hitler had strong control of it, and it went backward when this control got weaker. And obviously other authoritarian regimes in Europe, even ones led by dynamic and imaginative men, lacked a whole array of features that made Nazism especially toxic. (They would not have had access to latent German economic and technological prowess, either.)
The historian A.J.P. Taylor, who spent much of his life knife-fighting other historians over his interpretation of the Second World War, emphasized that Hitler was a gambler — that his individual character made a meaningful difference. Hitler was someone who started with a good run at the roulette table of German politics, and had success bluffing like mad in a zero-sum poker game with other European powers, but was always destined to go bust in the end. Taylor is probably read mostly by a small coterie of stylistic admirers like me now, but I think his metaphor contains the nucleus of the truth about the war.
We are sometimes asked to imagine a strategically competent alternative to Hitler, a leader of prudence who takes over as Führer after we kill baby Hitler and who makes a long-term success out of an oppressive German-dominated Europe. I can only say, with my toe on the threshold of the time machine, that I am willing to take that bet. Even statesmen in the orderly democratic Canada of (our timeline’s) 2015 make decisions that involve the deaths of innocents: this one seems like a relative doddle.
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