So ... when did we start trying to kill baby Hitler?
Phil Edwards was a senior producer for the Vox video team.
I sat down with James Gleick, the author of the fascinating, dreamlike new book Time Travel: A History. It chronicles the history of time travel as a concept, including the first story to include a fantasy about killing a young Hitler and, in the process, changing the course of history.
That first Hitler assassination (via time travel) came in Ralph Milne Farley’s story “I Killed Hitler” (originally published in Weird Tales and later collected in The Omnibus of Time). In that first story, a man travels back in time to kill his cousin, Adolf Hitler, only to become a Hitler-like figure himself.
The above video takes a tour through the history of time travel killings, from H.G. Wells’s invention of time travel to modern pop culture like The Terminator. (If you want to truly geek out on time travel, this site provides a great timeline.) Though the fantasy of killing Hitler is comic on its surface, there’s surprising depth to the philosophical dilemma.
And after all that, the question remains: Would you kill baby Hitler?
