So, no, placing a knife in your teeth and hurling yourself through time to kill Hitler isn't quite the no-brainer you think it is. Also! What if you went back in time to kill Hitler and then fucked it up? What if you didn't kill Hitler, and he stole your time machine, you colossal dicksore? Hitler now has a time machine! How fucked would we be then?

To find out, I programmed my computer to simulate every event in the world over for the past 70 years, assuming Hitler had a time machine, and then let it run over the weekend. Here's what it told me:

Immediately feeling "wiser" after the deed was committed and concluding it a success, Hitler would set to his next task.

... it likely would involve not engaging the Soviet Union when he did, doing more to delay America's entry into the war, or installing chain guns on his arms to get the jump on that assassin in the basement of Castle Wolfenstein.

ID Software
Or at least taking the time to hire a better architect.

Fortunately, for the sake of all that is good and right, Hitler would face an unavoidable obstacle in his efforts: time paradoxes. Basically, any action he took that would change the course of the war would also prevent you from obtaining a time machine and traveling back in the past for him to steal it. In a single-universe model, for him to obtain a time machine, it requires the war to be lost.

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Sorry, buddy.

But, that's clearly not what's happening here. Even the arrival of you into the past with your time machine and clumsy knife skills would be enough to disrupt the timeline. In this scenario, Hitler and the rest of us clearly exist in some form of a quantum multiverse, where a new branch of the universe is spun off for every possible outcome of every event. Hitler would thus be able to time travel freely, but only in the sense that he's altering his course between different branches of the multiverse. He could arrive in branches of the multiverse where he won the war, no doubt full of science-fiction writers wondering about the opposite. But, he couldn't change every branch of the multiverse. For that, he would need something more powerful ...

And then, he would presumably put on a funny hat and try to use its magic to seize control over the entire multiverse. Which would do precisely nothing. I'm not an expert on the occult, and feel intense pain when I approach any church or religious school, but I'm pretty sure that none of that old stuff was magic. That was God's power, if anything. Although the Nazis were definitely looking for Christian artifacts, the more reasonable guess why is that they were looking for evidence that they were made or used by Aryans, to prove that every famous person in history was an Aryan, and wow, aren't Aryans great?

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Pictured: Heinrich Himmler, a not-especially-great man.

So, even after bursting in on a surprised Jesus and his disciples, wrenching the cup from his hand, and disappearing in a flash of light, Hitler would still be frustrated by his continuing failure. For this, he would need real magic.

Assuming that Hitler doesn't jump around at random like an idiot (not a great assumption) and instead inches forward along the time-space continuum looking for weapons, he would again find a problem. All the weapons and advanced technology he'd really like would be kept locked up, leaving him only access to consumer products. Color televisions and space pens and inkjet printers are nice and all, but none of them would really alter the course of the war in all conceivable universes. Computer hardware simple enough to be reverse-engineered by Nazi scientists would also be pretty hard to come by. He could take a smartphone easily enough, but without 50 years of experience working with microelectronics, it's hard to say what the Nazis would do with it.

So, he would travel farther and ...

Fortunately for us and the entire metaverse, before he reaches that point, he'll have to travel past the point where time travel was invented. In an era where time travel is known and even commonplace, they would have all sorts of policies and procedures to deal with people like Hitler showing up. With technologies capable of detecting incoming time-sojourners, they would see him coming and arrest him on the spot. One imagines that every couple of days or so, the people of the future have to deal with Hitlers arriving from the infinitude of the multiverse.

The exact fate of Hitler is a little hard to determine at this point, depending a lot on the attitudes and moral framework the people of the future have. Given the sheer quantity of Hitlers they probably have showing up though, one imagines they would tire of imprisoning them, which is why most leading Hitler time-travel experts believe he would be fed into a time chipper.

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It sounds nicer than it is.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist in many branches of the multiverse. His first novel, Severance, is incredible and available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Apex Books. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.

See what happens when Anne Frank teams up with Goku to defeat Hitler in 5 Fan Fiction Sex Scenes You Won't Believe Exist and learn why HItler was akin to Wile E. Coyote in 5 Nazi Plans That Prove They Were Dumber Than You Think.

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