Hitler has died thousands of times in thousands of different ways, but because of a series of unexpected events it always takes much longer than planned, well in to the war, to kill him.

Four alternate explanations:

1. Time travel is invented in the year 7,415 CE. At this point, Nazi Germany's atrocities are no more urgent than the atrocities of a Babylonian king are to us.

2. Time travel is invented 160 years in the future, after the Great Crash has wiped out all historical records of the 20th century.

3. Time travel is expensive. It's the privilege of a few Comcast executives and oil barons, who are less concerned with righting history's great wrongs and more concerned with systematically screwing and looting their way through past, present, and future. To me this seems like the most likely option. It's equivalent to people 120 years ago asking, "If flight becomes practical, couldn't the sun be blocked out by millions upon millions of personal aeroplanes?" Yes and no, my hypothetical friend!

4. Time travellers, for whatever reason, are sympathetic toward Hitler. But only to a point.

Oh, right.

5. Hitler was a time traveller. Most likely one of those Comcast execs.

Hitler is alive because without him an even worse guy takes his place and time travel ends up not being invented.

oddeye, I can't buy that scenario. If you're talking about time travellers both having an interest in screwing with history and also having the ability to do it, how could a "devil you know" dilemma really pop up? These time travellers could smear events as many times as they need/want to, in order to create the outcome they want (or at least an outcome better than mothertackling Nazi Germany).

Unless the time travellers themselves are vulnerable to the changes they make? I've been assuming the time travellers are kept in a consequence-free suit of armour of some kind. But if the changes they make cause a ripple that wipes out the invention time travel itself, as you say, and also prevents them being able to correct it, then they'll have to be a lot more careful with their history-diddling.

In that case I could imagine Hitler being, not the lesser of two evils (because really), but the greater. They went back in time to stop a shitty painter's landscape style from dominating the next 150 years of aesthetics and criticism. They accidentally pushed him along a series of events that killed 60 million people. Whoops. They wish they could have their old, laughably-bad-yet-influential painter back, but they're afraid that if they tinker any more then the consequences will wipe out the invention of time travel itself. Now trapped in an alien 1938, they commit to drinking their consciences to sleep each night and watching the horror they set in motion unfold like a demented orchid planted near a gravestone next to a small abbey in the Twilight Zone.

You only think Hitler is bad because you're not from the timeline where we had Superhitler.

Assuming time travel were possible, you couldn't go back and kill Hitler as that would be paradoxical.

Urrgh. In my dreams these people are are herded into death camps and their entire families are randomly tackled by people dressed in football gear. As they get reduced to broken piles the guys in the football gear scream their own malvertising blurbs at them.

"WE SAY GOODBYE TO BETTY WHITE!"

"DENTISTS -HATE- HIM!"

"REDNECK ACCIDENTALLY KISSES HIS SISTER. YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!"

And I'm overseeing the whole thing dressed as some demented Roman emperor casually eating pickled eggs. This is my fetish(tm)

I know it's fashionable to hate catchy headlines, and that's fine. I hate them too. But please remember that the people who write them are working hard and being paid very little to crank that shit out. You're fantasizing about murdering Walmart cashiers and their families.

This concludes my "I have worked that job plz don't tackle my aunts in a deathcamp" PSA.

And yet we don't pity the bottom rung crack dealer

I'll tackle your aunts!

k but plz not in a deathcamp

Tackled in a DEATHCAMP, you won't believe what happens next!!!

New rule in leaves PoETV posters angry!

I'm assuming that through wide spacing of childbirths in your family that your aunts are 26.

No, but they're the next best thing.

Considerably older.

Time traveling cell phone user is the only explanation that makes sense. Open your fucking eyes!