How I Killed the Nazi Dictator Before He Ever Seized Power

A very brief science fiction story

by Robert Arvay

He was one of the evilest men ever to have lived.  His tyranny killed untold thousands of people, and he had intended to rule the world.

I took it upon myself to stop him.  You may ask, how? 

I was involved in a secret research project, one that involved the attempt to go backward in time, to the past, and thereby, to change it.  The project was being shut down.  It had been ruled too dangerous.  All of our equipment was being destroyed, and our research papers burned.

So, one night, using my special access codes, I broke into the central operations control room.  I placed myself in the module, and set the space-time coordinates to take me back to the time when the German dictator had been very young.

Soon, I found myself in Braunau am Inn, Austria.  The date was Apr 20, 1899.  I entered the house late at night, and found the young child asleep.  He looked so sweet and innocent, but I knew that he was destined to wreak havoc and destruction upon the world.  I overcame my revulsion, and killed him.  Then, I returned to the module, set it for the exact coordinates from which I had departed, and returned to the present time.  There, the research staff had me arrested, and destroyed the time-travel module.

I was relieved, however, to find that the evil dictator, Frankl Mendelheim, was no longer in the history books, and that he had not gone on to kill the hundred thousand people he would have killed, but for me.

Unfortunately, I found that Mendelheim, never having grown to power, was no longer the man who had killed an unknown German artist, the one who had thereafter become known to the world as Adolph Hitler, killer not of a hundred thousand, but of millions.

There are plans to go back in time and kill him, also.  I hope those plans will be cancelled, because if we do kill Hitler, he will be replaced by a man many times more evil than he was.

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