Author’s note:
This story includes Nazis, most preeminent among them being Hitler. If that name is difficult for you, as it is for me, be aware that it will come up on a frequent basis.
I’d like to think it’s clear that we all despise Hitler, Nazis, and the Holocaust, and wish they had never existed. I don’t think the story leaves any ambiguity in that regard, but in case your ideas of ambiguity are different from my own: it’s no spoiler to say that I absolutely hate Nazis, Hitler, and the fact that the Holocaust happened.
But they did happen, and I think that what we choose to do with that knowledge matters.
-JM
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I.
There are few things in life more satisfying than standing over Hitler’s dead body. At least, not the first time. He was there, in full-dress uniform, like the movies (well: like the movies used to be)—and he was everything I thought he might be: a strident martinet with a Napoleon complex, a man whose own sense of smallness next to the blonde giants of his guard made him clearly hate them, and hate himself; a martinet, an insufferable bore, a screaming psychopath ordering death after death, a sybarite, screaming to the public about decadence and living a secret life with decadence that might shock the most outré of underground clubs of the Wiemar Republic, had this selfsame little man not had every former club-owner shot.
There it is: it was 1943, and we’d killed Hitler.
The time mechanism was complicated and required quite a lot of energy, and could only be used for three round trips. (And they had to be round trips; you had to slingshot back where you started). The physics were beyond us; they’re beyond anyone but the small, dedicated group of scientists who had apparently been working on it for a very long time; decades and decades, working in secret. We were not picked for our scientific knowledge, but for a combination of high military rank (time travel was way above Top Secret; very few were cleared to know about it) and for practical skills. One cannot carry much in the way of complex technology into the past, so it’s back to knives and clubs for us.
Needless to say, there weren’t a lot of officers with wartime experience, sufficient pay-grade, and sufficient fitness to be able to carry out such a mission. We’d been briefed by the Chief of Staff directly; apparently, the President knew about the situation, but very few others did.
It wasn’t exactly easy. While this machine found the emanations of the one brain it was taught to sense, and it was able to avoid materializing us into a wall or something, there was a high probability we might not appear in exactly the right room, or at an opportune time. But we were experienced, if not exactly young. We could fight, we had each killed in war, and we were willing to arrive in unknown circumstances, take down opposition, and slay the beast.
And now it was done. We pressed the button and went home.
II.
It wasn’t different.
It was a little different. Some styles were a bit different. There never was a Star Wars; Leni Reifenstahl apparently had less influence on the Third Reich, and her directorial techniques had apparently powered a number of my favorite movies more than I liked to think. But World War II lasted about as long as it ever had, and ended for fairly similar reasons; mostly, the eventual military impossibility of resistance, after the depletion of German matériel and the atomic bombings of Japan.
And the Nazis had continued; had stayed in power until removed through utter defeat. Hitler had been succeeded by three other dictators, and while the infighting definitely did some damage, it hadn’t really been definitive. It hadn’t changed their policies in any meaningful ways.
I mean, everything was a bit different. Some things were worse. “Mein Kampf” wasn’t easy reading, even for fanatics. One of the despot’s successors had hired a much better ghost-writer, and the book now had a larger cult following than it had in “our” timeline.
There’s a lot to be said about changes in fashion, or pieces of history which were (to my mind, anyway) real, but trivial. But there was clearly only one thing to do, and while it wasn’t really our decision anyway, none of us disagreed when the Chief of Staff told us we had to return.
III.
It was harder killing Hitler in 1941.
He was less entrenched, but those around him were a bit more fanatical. I hadn’t really considered it that way; but it made sense. Power attracts sycophants, even among the insane. And it can also make you complacent. A dictator who feels invulnerable might be more interested in the pageantry of war than in actual protection. The farther removed you are from people actually shooting at you, the more you forget that cannons can do something to you other than fire salutes.
Still. We had to kill more guards, and we had wounded, but we did it. We stood around for a moment, in the post-battle quiet, looking down at the body.
Then we went home.
IV.
Same world. Different day.
Not the same. The whole Butterfly Effect concern seemed untrue—you know, the idea that if you disturb one small thing in history, it will have giant ripples? No giant ripples. I mean, I’m very sure some of it mattered a lot to some people. Psychedelics were outlawed a year later. The U.S.S.R. had a slightly different compliment of ‘freely elected’ overlords. We talked a little different from everything else, but it was no more difficult figuring out what people were saying, and giving it back, than it is to communicate with your teenage kid. The Telecaster, not the Stratocaster, was the dominant guitar in rock and roll, all the solos twanged a bit more, and “Hotel California” was the dominant song on oldies channels.
World War II? Still happened. Holocaust? Still happened.
We bandaged Harry, we sent Jim to the hospital, I pulled out my flask and passed it around.
We hadn’t stopped the root problem.
I didn’t look at anybody. I didn’t get authorization. I set the machine, and pressed the button.
V.
You could know who Hitler was going to become, in the 1930s, and still not pick him out of a lineup in 1907. May my grandson never read this, but he’s 15 at the time of my writing, and the monster we were gunning for didn’t look a whole hell of a lot different from most of my grandson’s friends. At 17, still trying to get into art school, Hitler looked like nothing more than another very impatient kid, out to make some kind of mark in the world. We knew what he was (what he’d become?)—and so seeing him in this form shouldn’t have made a difference. But it did, a little. Plus, at least the 1930s and 1940s were a little like the movies, for us. The late 1900s were just an alien place for twenty-first century eyes. And, of course, we were not within sumptuous apartments, themselves surrounded by a military compound. These were civilians everywhere you looked. And before, we’d gotten in and out fast, because while our clothes were as nondescript as possible, they were still outlandish; we hadn’t bothered trying to costume up, because we were sure to be inaccurate in some small details, and besides, we’re soldiers, not actors.
And we’d been up a long time. Two pitched battles in one day, and for us, we’d been on mission almost eighteen hours.
And still we were watching, from the concealment of a small copse of trees, when the Thule approached us.
We didn’t know that’s what they were, of course. And if we had known, we’d have been wrong about what that meant. The approached us wisely, which is to say, they walked into our peripheral vision and stood still. So the fact that there was a group of people looking at us intently startled us, but not to the point where we reached for our weapons. Not yet.
One of them was familiar, and as she slowly unfroze and began walking towards us, I recognized her: she was the chief of the scientists who had given us the device.
“We should talk,” she said. Unlike us, she—and the rest of them—were wearing clothing perfectly in keeping with the period.
I looked at the others, but we all just shrugged. We were tired, confused; the adrenaline rush of battle had long worn off, leaving us with post-combat fatigue, and besides, we were way over our heads. What exactly were we going to do if they had ill intentions? Go back to the Chief of Staff and say, “We killed the mission’s scientists while we were AWOL on an authorized mission which we were, at the time, failing to carry out”?
We sat. She started talking.
“We’re the descendants of an organization you might know as the Thule.” She looked around; blank stares from all of us, except Jean, who had a thing for comic books. Jean actually had the energy to raise an eyebrow.
“You are thinking that I am neither the right race, nor the correct gender, to be a member of the organization of which you are aware? You are correct. This is, very literally, not our grandparents’ Thule society. Indeed, we no longer go by that name, but, as names have power, we respectfully will not tell you what we are now called. Regardless, it is probably helpful to think of us as practitioners of a discredited branch of science, although, sincerely, ‘sorcery’ is a much better term. Our organization predated, but was associated with, the Nazis, and our predecessors assisted them significantly, which is to our shame and to our discredit. It is also part of why we are here.”
“We would like to apologize for what we have done to you, as one must apologize to all unwitting travelers through time. You, and the Chief of Staff, and the President, will all have the difficult experience of remembering a reality which does not match that of anyone you will encounter, any films, any movies. You ‘know’ that Adolf Hitler died in 1945; the rest of the world, when you return, will ‘know’ that it happened in 1941, with strange rumors that he still lived and was ‘actually’ killed in 1943 and 1945. There will be certain more significant aftershocks and side effects, but you’ll survive them, we’d imagine. Most of you will, anyway. We usually do.”
We all looked at the ground, confused, exhausted, angry. Finally, I spoke. “What the hell is this all about?” I asked.
She said, “It is possible to change the past in ways which bring about a desired effect. It’s difficult, most particularly because our views of ‘the past’ influence the present far more than the actual words and actions of a given person or situation.
“When World War II ended, the world faced a question: How did this happen? There were a number of debates, and two of the most important ideas were that either the German people were uniquely bestial; or that Hitler has a very special malevolence, a contagious maelstrom of psychopathology, able to force a large civilization to act like monsters.
“In the modern world, we don’t believe that an individual people are evil. So we set on taking a very big truth—that if anyone could be called ‘evil’, it was Hitler—and tried to make it the only truth.”
“This is the thing we choose not to know. Any large group can be stirred into unspeakable inhumanity if it simply decides, with sufficient force, that its opponents are inhuman, that its opponents are vile, that its opponents are not simply malice personified, but the reason for every heinous thing. That those with whom we disagree, or those we despise, cannot simply be wrong, cannot simply disagree with us, but must instead be fiends, whose very existence threatens our sanity, our lives, our happiness, and our future.
“There is a word for someone whose existence threatens your sanity, life, happiness, and future: human. And there is a word for someone whose existence is the hope for your sanity, life, happiness, and future: human.
“Hitler isn’t just any human; no-one should emulate him; if you were to take the worst of everything we are, package it in a small human skin, and give it a name, the Füehrer would be that thing. What he would not be is the only Füehrer. It’s not that what happened was inevitable; it’s that trying to stop it by getting rid of one evil turns blind eyes to all the other evils surrounding it. There are futures where, if you kill him now, someone better rises to the top; and there are futures, Commander, where what happens is worse.”
“You seem pretty sure of yourself,” I said, quietly. She shook her head.
“I’m sure that we have forgotten that Evil doesn’t lie in a single person or a single idea. Or even in a group of people. Human suffering is complicated. Sometimes, we fight best with knowledge. By the nature of this mission, both by who was needed to perform it, and what the mission was, your opinions will carry much weight when you return. I’m not being cryptic when I say ‘use them wisely’; I am not a soldier, not highly-placed, and while we are influential enough that we could arrange what happened, we are not exactly…trusted in the halls of power. Which is not surprising, and it’s not wrong.”
“This is stupid!” Jean said. “I don’t believe any crap about you being powerful to make all this happen, and then unable to do anything more than give us some kind of lesson and send us home. Why don’t you stop what happened?”
The light was fading—and I was bone-weary—but I could see her face: regret. Sadness. Shame.
“We tried,” she said, softly. “We inherited our positions—yes, even I; the Thule’s anti-aging spells worked well until they began to exhibit dangerous side-effects, over a hundred years later, and they were forced to choose successors in haste. They didn’t like their children, had never expected their children to take power, had expected to live forever. They didn’t like their grandchildren. They barely knew us; but they were loving, and kind, even to those of us whose birth was not to their liking.”
“And to us, they were our great-grandparents, old, eccentric, always surrounded by guards and military forces, but with us, they were affectionate, loving, and kind.
“But they were dictators nonetheless. They ordered many deaths. They curtailed many freedoms. And when we were old enough, and could see enough of what they’d done, and had enough of their magic imbued into us, our course became clear. With resolution, with the certainty of knowing that it had to be done, we went back in time, each to a different home, and each of us introduced ourselves, individually, to our grand-sires. They were overjoyed to see us, and each and every one of them embraced us. And in that moment of gentleness, they let down their guards, and we killed them, each and every one.
“We fully expected to be blasted into oblivion—isn’t that the old paradox, kill your ancestor, disappear?—but history re-arranged itself. And someone had to carry the power of the Thule, because it couldn’t simply vanish. And the lot fell upon us again; this time, our paths had been different—we could hardly have inherited from those who couldn’t have brought us into being—but we remained more-or-less ourselves. Unfortunately.
“So we, the murderers of our past, returned to find a future very changed. Our ancestors had never ruled; had barely even been known. But Hitler had risen in in their stead. Less sane. Less powerful. Far more angry. Far more charismatic. And, indeed, without the Thule, Germany’s economic collapse after the first World War was even more pronounced, and the forces of history were even more sharp-edged.”
The Thule had seemed, even a moment ago, to be completely at ease in this odd situation; now they looked as if they were desperately hoping to sink right out of their skins and into the dirt.
She looked down. “…and we probably weren’t the first, ourselves.”
She looked at me again. “We’re not wise watchers-from-afar. We’re patricidal fools with a little more perspective on human history than most.”
I said, “I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise anything.”
That’s when we heard the shot.
There was Jean, grinning like an idiot. “I did it!” Jean shouted. “While you were standing around, I did it!” There was a spring in the soldier’s step and a feral joy glinted in those two dark eyes. “Let’s get home,” said Jean. “Do you think they’ll throw us a parade?”
I could almost feel it: a drumbeat of anger, hammering in an ancient part of my heart, almost pushing thought away. Which would have been a mercy; but it was only almost.
“Sure,” I said, not meeting Jean’s gaze, not meeting anyone’s glance. “I bet they really like parades, back home.”
I added, under my breath, “…or whatever passes for home now.”
I pushed the button that took us back. Because we deserved what we got.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
