Often times I post an entry on my blog for the sole purpose of giving myself a permanent bookmark on a particular theme and this is one: The Internet meme that everybody [who is a time traveler] kills Hitler on their first trip. This one is not necessarily new to me, but I keep forgetting it when I see it. After flipping through all the episodes of Dr. Who on Netflix and seeing one titled “Let’s Kill Hitler,” and today’s XKCD referencing it, I am compelled.
The premise is that every time traveller, when they make their first voyage, travels back in time to kill Adolph Hitler, and thus changes the course of human history and destroying life as we know it. Usually someone else follows behind him and subverts the assassination attempt to make right the course of history.
This post is apparently one of the first references online to the meme:
http://www.abyssapexzine.com/wikihistory/
Others have expanded:
Hitler’s Time Travel Exemption Act
Godwin’s Law of Time Travel
The source of the paradox, Robert Heinlein’s story By His Bootstraps, included in The Green Hills of Earth & The Menace from Earth.
Jeremy B. Blevins 