keyword "reflection" title "unintended consequences" in misc. flash fiction

In every timeline where we killed Hitler early, things ended up as least as bad. Usually worse. Here at Zeitgeist Time Management, sitting outside of causality, we learned this the hard way. Every fresh staff member, that’s the first thing they want to do, kill Hitler when he was young, suffocate him in his crib or frag him in the trenches of The Great War. But looking back, you need to consider how half of why the Allies won at all was that Hitler was a paranoid deluded blowhard who just could not brook negative news, let alone accept good advice.

Germany in the 1920s was a stew of economic collapse, empire-lust and racism with or without any one syphilitic propagandist. Something like the Nazis were going to rise no matter what, but without Hitler, they pulled it off much more efficiently. In many of the timelines his early death created, millions more were sent to camps, the war dragged on for decades even when the Allies still won, ruining Europe for generations, killing so many more. With someone competent at the helm, often only the atomic annihilation of Berlin ended the madness. There are worlds where the person filling in that void won by simply not double-crossing Stalin so very early on. Your history hinges largely on that one awful man undermining military strategy with his arrogance.

There was the one timeline where we sent back people to prop him up as a celebrated painter in his youth instead of killing him that went just… equally as bad but then he ended up replacing Bob Ross as the resident artist on American public television and so we scrapped that one too.

No, the bunker underneath Berlin, that was the perfect time for us to do it, so we did. Killed him like a sewer-rat and staged it as by his own hand, to put a punctuation on the entire mess. What, you thought he had the courage or inclination to take his own life? He’d spent his days believing his own lies, no one like that can see defeat when it arrives, these narcissists always have a new rationalization for how they’ll still somehow end up on top, up to the bitter end.

You should’ve seen the realities where he was taken alive, then tried and executed at Nuremberg. It made a martyr of him, deified him, fueled resistance into the Sixties. An extra million needless deaths, twenty-five more cities ruined in block-to-block warfare with that fascist remainder. The image of him blowing his own brains out in a basement was exactly what history needed and so we made it happen. We take our job seriously at the Zeitgeist, trust us, it could’ve been so much worse. In the long-view’s reflection, in text books and in life, you can’t only focus on how it all could have been so much better, you need to face down how much worse it could have all gone down, as well. You’re welcome.