Would You Kill Baby Hitler?

Elon Musk recently posted a funny Babylon Bee sketch about killing Adolf Hitler.

A young progressive activist travels back in time to 1933 and bursts in on Hitler while he sits painting in his apartment. She announces that she has come from the year 2026 to kill him. He seems more inconvenienced than alarmed, and asks her politely why.

She explains that he is a fascist who used the power of the state to crush the people he disliked, and that she has come to stop him. He brightens considerably. He likes the sound of using the power of the state to crush the people you dislike.

Over the next few minutes the two of them work through her politics item by item, and he enthusiastically agrees with nearly all of it. By the end she cannot bring herself to shoot and she leaves.

It's a good satire based on an old philosophical question: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?

The New York Times Magazine discussed the question a decade ago.

There’s a Jewish answer that almost nobody gives.

Moral Calculus

The arithmetic beneath the question looks easy. On one side of the scale there is an infant, a few days old, in a bedroom in Braunau am Inn in the spring of 1889. On the other side there are six million Jews, and a war that killed tens of millions more. One squeeze of a trigger and none of it happens. Isn’t killing baby Hitler a no-brainer?

But the question is a lot more complicated than it looks because that simple trade-off only works if the whole century follows from the one crib. Kill the baby and the Nazi party never rises, the war never comes, the extermination camps are never built.

Every part of that is an assumption and you’re betting a child's life on all of it holding.

Most people who think about the question seriously end up in one of two places; both of them are versions of that same worry.

The first is historical. Hitler was not the sole cause of what happened to us. Remove him and you have not removed the antisemitism that ran through European civic life and state policy for centuries, or the humiliation and collapse that followed the First World War, or the thousands upon thousands of ordinary people across a dozen countries who carried out the killing with their own hands and did not need much persuading. The forces were already in the water. He rode them expertly and made them far worse, but he did not invent them.

The second is the time-travel paradox. In a famous Twilight Zone episode the assassin succeeds and Hitler's mother quietly raises a substitute child under the same name. That child grows up to do all of it anyway. In one novel, the attempt on his life is itself the thing that turns him into an antisemite.

Both of these arguments are about consequences: don't shoot because you cannot know what happens next. Which means that if you could know, you should shoot.

That is where Judaism’s answer parts company.

The Question God Asked the Angels

In the biblical story, Hagar and her son Ishmael have been sent away from Abraham's household. They wander, their water runs out, and the boy begins to die. Hagar sets him down under a bush and moves off a distance, because she cannot bear to watch her child die. Then God hears the boy's voice, opens her eyes, and shows her a well.

A well-known rabbinic reading imagines the ministering angels watching this and objecting. They know what Ishmael's descendants will one day do to Abraham's other descendants. So they ask: Master of the universe, for a boy whose children will kill Your children with thirst, You are creating a well?

As Rabbi Benjamin Blech masterfully explained, God does not tell them they have the future wrong. He asks them a different question altogether. Right now, is he righteous or wicked?

Righteous, they answer.

Then by his present deeds I judge him. (Genesis Rabbah 53:14)

God does not dispute a single word of the angel’s forecast. But it’s not relevant. Even with the future laid out in front of you, the boy in the desert is judged by who he is on the morning you find him.

That’s why you can’t shoot baby Hitler in 1889.

The baby in Braunau am Inn was not yet evil.

If a person can be justly killed for what he is going to do in the future, then what he is going to do must already be fixed, and his life is not a sequence of choices but the playing out of a sentence passed before he was born. Judaism places free will at the foundation of its belief system. The baby in Braunau am Inn was not yet evil. He was a person who would go on to make, across the following 40 years, a long chain of decisions, every one of which could have gone another way, and not one of which he had made yet.

Pull the trigger and you are announcing that the child never had a choice, eradicating free will from the equation. That goes against the essence of Judaism.

Free Will is the Pillar of Jewish Belief

If you don't have genuine freedom to choose, then how can you be held responsible? How can the Torah command you to do anything? How can there be such a thing as transgression, or growth, or repentance? The whole structure collapses.

Maimonides writes:

Free will is granted to all men. If one desires to turn himself to the path of good and be righteous, the choice is his. Should he desire to turn to the path of evil and be wicked, the choice is his...

This principle [free will] is a fundamental concept and a pillar on which rests the totality of the Torah and mitzvot as (Deuteronomy 30:15) states: "Behold, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil." Similarly, (Deuteronomy 11:26) states, "Behold, I have set before you today the blessing and the curse," implying that the choice is in your hands…

God desired that man have free choice and be responsible for his deeds, without being pulled or forced. Rather, he, on his own initiative, with the knowledge which God has granted him, will do anything that man is able to do.

Therefore, he is judged according to his deeds. If he does good, he is treated with beneficence. If he does bad, he is treated harshly. –Rambam, Laws of Repentance, Ch 5

Without free will, you're just a puppet. With it, you're a partner with God in creation. That changes everything about how you see your life, your choices, your responsibility.

Confronting Evil

None of this makes Judaism naive about evil. The Talmud teaches, “If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first” (Berakhot 58a).

The first act recorded of Moses is killing an Egyptian who was in the middle of murdering a Hebrew slave. Innocence is not a permanent status. It ends the second a person chooses to do evil, and we are obligated to respond.

So no, you can’t kill baby Hitler in 1889. Not because history would have found another way around him, and not because you might have the wrong baby, but because he hadn’t done anything wrong yet. Killing Hitler the man, in 1941, mid-crime? That's a moral obligation.