Building a time machine . . . the Hitler quandry

Dravokivich

ScumLord wrote: »

The beetle was designed and built before the war, in fact if there was no war the production wouldn't have been put on hold to make way for the military.

Germans had stamp books that they bought stamps for to put towards buying a beetle, but then Hitler decided to take all their money and spend it on the war instead.

Hitler had it commissioned in the 30's didn't he?

ScumLord

lanos wrote: »

backwards timetravel will never be possible because if it was (or will be ) dozens of people would have travelled back with the benefit of hindsight and cured all the worlds ills or enslaved us all.
q.e.d

The problem I have with backwards time travel is that you'd basically have to make everything in the universe go backwards exactly the way it came, I don't see how you could make a sun work backwards or guarantee it would go back exactly the same way it came.

Although given how bizarre quantum mechanics are it's hard to rule anything out anymore.

Wossack wrote: »

if we've no hoverboards, and self lacing Nike runners next year, you can blame that git McFly for feckin over Biff

The hoverboard has arrived!

ScumLord

Dravokivich wrote: »

Hitler had it commissioned in the 30's didn't he?

I don't know that it wouldn't have happened anyway, state funded cars of the people were the order of the day at the time. the big European countries wanted to mobilise their citizens with cheap cars, the Germans just did it much better than anyone else. The French made some horrendous cars.

James may did a good series on the history of certain cars and car types where he covers the peoples car boom of the time.

Micky Dolenz

Post war when German Industry was being dismantled, an English general saved VW and began mass producing the beetle as a military "run around" vehicle. That shade of green suited it.

Steve F

Forget it people it ain't gonna happen.If the ability to travel backwards and forwards in time had been invented surely there would be loads of time travelers turning up at historic events like the Crucifixion,JFK's shooting,John Lennons murder the list would be endless.We are all on s space time continual.By the way did I ever tell you about my ability to become invisible? ;0)

smcgiff

Steve F wrote: »

Forget it people it ain't gonna happen.If the ability to travel backwards and forwards in time had been invented surely there would be loads of time travelers turning up at historic events like the crucifiction,JFK's shooting,John Lennons murder the list would be endless.We are all on s space time continual.By the way did I ever tell you about my ability to become invisable? ;0)

*cough*

bear1

Well let's say this was hypothetically possible.
Mussolini would still have led Italy to fascism and Franco would still have won the war in Spain and Goering would still have existed within the German government.
With Hitler not around Goering would have been the person to take his place who was much smarter and then the things would have looked very different.
We may now have had Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Yugoslavia as one major world power.
We need to remember that WW1 would still have happened and the Treaty of Versailles would have still bankrupted Germany.

A more interesting question would have been, what would have happened if Hitler WON the war?
Well it's quite clear at this point that Hitler should not have gone so quickly East bound. Instead he should have concentrated more on the land he already took.
Hitlers biggest problem was oil, to further his attack he needed more oil than he thought, luckily for him Mussolini decided to attack Libya and Greece. Hitler also sent them troops to help secure the land.
Of course Greece would have been a good place to have in order to then go onto the Middle East where oil is all for the taking. He could then island hop to Cyprus and then plan an assault on Syria and Lebanon.
France had a very limited amount of power in Middle East but I think this would have been easy for Hitler.
Taking Turkey as well may have proved essential for a successful Barbarossa mission as they would have taken the Russian oil filed in the Caucases. So Barbarossa would have been done from the south and from the west.
I'm probably over thinking it at this point, but if all of that had been successful then it would have been quite possible that Hitler moved onto India with Japan meeting them along the way.
The UK would have fallen not much later and with the allies now at a crisis point the US would have been alone.
The US would have still invented the atomic bomb but what would the US look like now is something I can't fathom. Swastika over Washington?

BBJBIG

Act on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a Universal Law ...

jamesbere

Go back and kill jedward, save the human race

lanos

bear1 wrote: »

but what would the US look like now is something I can't fathom. Swastika over Washington?

a much better scenario if you ask me

Guy:Incognito

Shiraz 4.99 wrote: »

What was the answer the last time ?

7

lanos

jamesbere wrote: »

Go back and kill jedward, save the human race

the list is endless
Stalin
George Bush / Tony Blair
L. Ron Hubbard
Ryan Tubridy

seamus

bear1 wrote:

The US would have still invented the atomic bomb but what would the US look like now is something I can't fathom. Swastika over Washington?[

You have to remember that the US and Soviets were Allies in WWII. So Germany could not have progressed eastwards without many significant battles - USSR, China & Japan. No doubt most of the other big Asian countries would have put up a strong fight too. Hitler's biggest mistake was going eastwards at all, he should have stopped at Ukraine and focussed on Europe.

It's unlikely there would have been a swastika over Washington as the Nazis really lacked the manpower and technology to make a strike westwards towards the US. Had they overrun the UK and Ireland, they would have basically have to stop there. There are obviously some small islands in the Atlantic that they could use to build a western front, but they'd be massively vulnerable to attack from the US. The same would be true of the US attacking eastwards of course, so likely there would be a stalemate on that front and perhaps even a truce of sorts.
The US would have the slight upper hand in that they could build a northern front moving troops through Canada and Greenland, into Iceland. But like Hitler discovered in Russia, that's a hard route to take.

Germany would still of course be vulnerable from the east, but the advent of the nuclear age would probably have given birth to a 3-way cold war, with battles taking place in proxy nations in Africa, the middle east and southeast Asia. Which would have led to some interesting combinations where the US & USSR are allies in on place while they fight Germany, but in another theatre, Germany & the US are allied against the USSR.

This 3-way cold war is in fact the scenario that inspired George Orwell to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.

jimgoose

ScumLord wrote: »

I don't know that it wouldn't have happened anyway, state funded cars of the people were the order of the day at the time. the big European countries wanted to mobilise their citizens with cheap cars, the Germans just did it much better than anyone else. The French made some horrendous cars.

James may did a good series on the history of certain cars and car types where he covers the peoples car boom of the time.

I believe Hitler approached Ferdinand Porsche in 1934 with a design brief for an affordable, robust little yoke with a decent level of performance by the standards of the day. Whether someone else would have done similar in his absence around that time is an interesting question, mind you. And I wouldn't be too hard on Frenchie with his Deux Cheveau-Vapeurs.

StormWarrior

Here is a better idea. Go back in time to just before Hitler's mother got pregnant and impregnate her yourself with a different baby. Hitler will never be born. As the child grows up, start flooding the streets with LSD tabs. Everyone takes acid and gets into peace and love. Instead of WW2 the hippie movement starts a few decades early. Don't let acid get banned and we will all live together in peace and harmony forever. Instead of Hitler the baby will grow up to be a proponent of peace and love, and a world leader who changes everything for the better.

RobertKK

Maybe stop Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated and prevent WW1.

robertpatterson

Manach wrote: »

Give the teen Hitler an arts scholarship.
That was the premise of one scifi story.
So the world gains one painter and losses a dictator.

Don't know which is worse lol

smcgiff

RobertKK wrote: »

Maybe stop Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated and prevent WW1.

While a trigger, I doubt its prevention would have stopped WW1 from happening.

Tokyo

According to one theory, you'd just end up with a parallel universe where Hitler never existed - he'd still have existed in the timeline that we find ourselves in right now - from our perspective, nothing would have changed.

But even so, it would be a huge risk killing Hitler as a baby - for better or worse, he was probably the most important figure of the 20th century and although his death would have prevented the deaths of tens of millions more, his life has affected billions in ways too unpredictable to speculate accurately about. For example, we kill Hitler, and instead find that Stalin conquers Europe and isn't in the least better. We prevent WWII and the bombing of Hiroshima, and learn that ten times as many weapons, of much larger yield, were used in the Vietnam War. So on and so forth.

qt3.14

Another thing to remember is all the people who would not exist if you killed Hitler and stopped ww2.
That guy who doesn't die in the concentration camps meets that girl who in our timeline escaped to the US and had a family with a yank. Her whole lineage changes to the modern day. Multiply that scenario by a couple of magnitudes and there's very few countries that wouldn't have a massive population shift.
Even for plenty of Irish people, the causal chain that lead to your birth could very well have been affected by the war or at least the subsequent stalemate in europe. So you could be writing yourself out of existence.

Steve F

smcgiff wrote: »

*cough*

Spelling,yeah?:rolleyes:

mad muffin

Go back in time and kill Christ. All the worlds problems are solved forever…

DeadHand

Killing Hitler may not have prevented WW2.

The fury in Germany at the time elevated Hitler, Hitler didn't create that fury he only stoked it. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else.

Kaltenbrunner, Hess, Bormann, Himmler, Goebbells and Goering would all have been knocking around to latch onto the public anger and the military's thirst for revenge.

People underestimate just how crazy and ambitious Hitler's closest henchmen were. They were squabbling over the succession even as the door to Hitler's office was literally being kicked in.

I'd be inclined to leave things as they are... With Hitler removed it's possible they'd turn out worse...

JaseBelleVie

Command & Conquer: Red Alert would be the outcome of the OP, to be honest.

World War II would essentially be between the Western Allies and the Soviets, with World War III following on with mind-controlled squid and Yuri and all that.

Tony EH

DeadHand wrote: »

Killing Hitler may not have prevented WW2.

The fury in Germany at the time elevated Hitler, Hitler didn't create that fury he only stoked it. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else.

Kaltenbrunner, Hess, Bormann, Himmler, Goebbells and Goering would all have been knocking around to latch onto the public anger and the military's thirst for revenge.

People underestimate just how crazy and ambitious Hitler's closest henchmen were. They were squabbling over the succession even as the door to Hitler's office was literally being kicked in.

I'd be inclined to leave things as they are... With Hitler removed it's possible they'd turn out worse...

There was absolutely no fury for war in the Germany of the 1930's that's for sure.

Hitler didn't come to power on a platform of "let's start a major war and kill a few Jews on the side". He got to power promising the German people what they wanted to hear. That was the rejection of the crippling Versailles conditions, an end to the depression, making Germany strong and relevant again and most importantly, work for its people. This sated the working classes and middle classes, who had been hit the hardest. The upper classes were enamoured with the idea that he was going to tackle the Communist issue and also deal with Socialist elements that they felt were a threat to their particular situation.

All of which he delivered, which is why many Germans of all ages and political colours were very impressed.

What Hitler didn't tell the Gerries (not directly anyway)was exactly how he was going to deliver on those promises and that he harboured a desire to invade eastern Europe in a devastating war of conquest. Although he vaguely outlined the latter idea in 'Mein Kampf'. Unfortunately, while a lot of German households had a copy of 'Mein Kampf' on their bookshelf in the 1930s, there weren't too many that actually read the laborious tome, fully believed what was being said, or fully understood what Hitler was actually saying in amongst the flowery text.

Thus, when Poland was invaded in 1939, the news was greeted in Germany with shock and resounding silence. Unlike the news of the Great War, which was characterised by streets full of fervent people in all of the major combatant nations.

There were too many Germans who remembered The Great War and the utter clamity that it visited upon their families.

As far as Hitler's "henchmen" are concerned, there are none who would have actually started a war. While they were ruthless in their ambition for power within the party itself, that ruthlessness didn't extend to the warlike tendencies that Hitler possessed. In fact, nearly all of them were aprehensive about attacking Poland, including much of Germany's military minds, who believed that negotiations over the Danzig issue were working, which they in fact were, up until the point that Britain did a complete about face on her previous policy and made a foolish "guarantee" to Poland's sovereignty. A move which made the Poles completely shut up shop and almost decided the next move for Hitler which was to call Chamberlain's bluff.

cerastes

smcgiff wrote: »

Not many laughs in your movie then.

I never said my version was a comedy

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

how would they get the time machine from Hill Valley to Austria?

Well there were a few time machines, they could go forward or back to the point where they had the flying one, wasnt there a train, that could fly, there, hey presto.
Or simply go back in time and then hitch hike to Austria, well stow away or earn their keep making money on events they know will come to pass, get to Austria, look up frau hitler, swift kick to the womb, wallop over the head, they should probably take a peek and try find out who the ripper is too, Im curious, or drop the ripper off in Austria.

lanos wrote: »

the list is endless
Stalin
George Bush / Tony Blair
L. Ron Hubbard
Ryan Tubridy

Mine is Tubridy, Bush/Blair, Hitler/mao/stalin, hubbard, Capt birds eye, actually you can stick ahern & co and the current guy in with Tubridy.

StormWarrior wrote: »

Here is a better idea. Go back in time to just before Hitler's mother got pregnant and impregnate her yourself with a different baby. Hitler will never be born. As the child grows up, start flooding the streets with LSD tabs. Everyone takes acid and gets into peace and love. Instead of WW2 the hippie movement starts a few decades early. Don't let acid get banned and we will all live together in peace and harmony forever. Instead of Hitler the baby will grow up to be a proponent of peace and love, and a world leader who changes everything for the better.

What if this different baby is hitler?

RobertKK wrote: »

Maybe stop Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated and prevent WW1.

smcgiff wrote: »

While a trigger, I doubt its prevention would have stopped WW1 from happening.

Ok I got it, go back clobber Bismark at Ems

mad muffin wrote: »

Go back in time and kill Christ. All the worlds problems are solved forever…

May as well round up all the others too, maybe not Buddha,

DeadHand wrote: »

Killing Hitler may not have prevented WW2.

The fury in Germany at the time elevated Hitler, Hitler didn't create that fury he only stoked it. If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else.

Kaltenbrunner, Hess, Bormann, Himmler, Goebbells and Goering would all have been knocking around to latch onto the public anger and the military's thirst for revenge.

People underestimate just how crazy and ambitious Hitler's closest henchmen were. They were squabbling over the succession even as the door to Hitler's office was literally being kicked in.

I'd be inclined to leave things as they are... With Hitler removed it's possible they'd turn out worse...

I'll say one thing for him at least Hitler killed Hitler

wendell borton

JaseHeath wrote: »

Command & Conquer: Red Alert would be the outcome of the OP, to be honest.

World War II would essentially be between the Western Allies and the Soviets, with World War III following on with mind-controlled squid and Yuri and all that.

But on the plus side we'd have tesla coils.

smcgiff

cerastes wrote: »

I'll say one thing for him at least Hitler killed Hitler

And I think the baby swap which turned out to be Hitler was on either a twighlight zone or a copy show.

VinLieger

Did we learn nothing from Command and Conquer : Red Alert?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R6xCWcf_VU

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Said it before, saying it again:

If Hitler came to power in the modern era, the exact same thing would happen all over again.

The One Doctor

The One Doctor wrote: »

If Hitler never existed then genuine grievances the German people had after WW1 (war reparations etc) would have come out some other way. There's a very good chance that you'd change European history for the worse.

Yes, Hitler was just the han in the right place at the right time etc. etc
It could have been any of many disillusioned Germans of the time who became the leader. The outcome would have been similar, but the ending could have been different.

Hidalgo

smcgiff wrote: »

While a trigger, I doubt its prevention would have stopped WW1 from happening.

You'd have to set your time clock a bit earlier and go back to the first years if the 20th century and stop the Balkan Wars. That might mean no Franz Ferdinand assassination.

But then you'd probably have to go back a bit further to prevent some other catalyst.
And so on and so on.

bear1

seamus wrote: »

You have to remember that the US and Soviets were Allies in WWII. So Germany could not have progressed eastwards without many significant battles - USSR, China & Japan. No doubt most of the other big Asian countries would have put up a strong fight too. Hitler's biggest mistake was going eastwards at all, he should have stopped at Ukraine and focussed on Europe.

It's unlikely there would have been a swastika over Washington as the Nazis really lacked the manpower and technology to make a strike westwards towards the US. Had they overrun the UK and Ireland, they would have basically have to stop there. There are obviously some small islands in the Atlantic that they could use to build a western front, but they'd be massively vulnerable to attack from the US. The same would be true of the US attacking eastwards of course, so likely there would be a stalemate on that front and perhaps even a truce of sorts.
The US would have the slight upper hand in that they could build a northern front moving troops through Canada and Greenland, into Iceland. But like Hitler discovered in Russia, that's a hard route to take.

Germany would still of course be vulnerable from the east, but the advent of the nuclear age would probably have given birth to a 3-way cold war, with battles taking place in proxy nations in Africa, the middle east and southeast Asia. Which would have led to some interesting combinations where the US & USSR are allies in on place while they fight Germany, but in another theatre, Germany & the US are allied against the USSR.

This 3-way cold war is in fact the scenario that inspired George Orwell to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I'd agree, I was merely speculating would COULD have happened.
I stand ny my point though that Hitler should have concentrated more on what he had and shifted more towards oil rice countries.
Romania was his most successful point when it came to oil.
If he had taken the middle east then I think WW2 would have been a different story.
The US and Russia were allies before but we need to remember that Hitler and Stalin had the non agression act.
AS you said, Hitler should have stopped before Russia, this was his downfall.
I think if he had waited with Barbarossa then things would have been different. Attacking Russia from the south and west would have successful in my opinion as Russia was unprepared.
OF course a Swastika over Washington is extemely far fetched but the US would have been very vunerable.

Firefox11

VinLieger wrote: »

Did we learn nothing from Command and Conquer : Red Alert?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R6xCWcf_VU

You beat me to it. The Ruskies got their revenge on Einstein later anyway.:D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tnfkR-ME2w

cerastes

Hidalgo wrote: »

You'd have to set your time clock a bit earlier and go back to the first years if the 20th century and stop the Balkan Wars. That might mean no Franz Ferdinand assassination.

But then you'd probably have to go back a bit further to prevent some other catalyst.
And so on and so on.

Reminds me of a double episode of star trek voyager, where some group kept trying to fix time so history would work out and they had to keep going back to refix because of all the errors and unforseen problems that arose.

bear1 wrote: »

I'd agree, I was merely speculating would COULD have happened.
I stand ny my point though that Hitler should have concentrated more on what he had and shifted more towards oil rice countries.
Romania was his most successful point when it came to oil.
If he had taken the middle east then I think WW2 would have been a different story.
The US and Russia were allies before but we need to remember that Hitler and Stalin had the non agression act.
AS you said, Hitler should have stopped before Russia, this was his downfall.
I think if he had waited with Barbarossa then things would have been different. Attacking Russia from the south and west would have successful in my opinion as Russia was unprepared.
OF course a Swastika over Washington is extemely far fetched but the US would have been very vunerable.

Unless it ended up being raised voluntarily, there were plenty that had no desire to go to war with germany or even sympathised with them, anti communist, pro white. If Japan hadnt conveniently attacked US territory and Roosevelt conveniently lumped in with Churchill and actually aided an enemy of Germany then maybe they might not have been poles apart from the Germans.

CINCLANTFLT

Shiraz 4.99 wrote: »

So I've done the impossible, built a machine to allow me travel back in time to Austria say 1890, I walk into his nursery & shot baby Hitler in the face.

Judge me, am I a baby murderer or a saviour of millions ?.
Is there a definitive answer ?.

Please God no!!! My wife escaped from a timeline without Hitler... There it is Stalin that was the dictator who caused The Great Dying... EurAsia is a brutal camp of death... Now under the boot of Marshall Zhou... After the 1942 when the USSR overran Europe in league with the Prussian Republic they entered The Terror of the Gallows... 20 million dead in France, Spain, Italy...
Then the clash with the United States over Bermuda and Iceland in 1952 made the Yankees unleash their LandSun Atomics... The League responded with the Plague Dogs... DC rotted... Moscow, Canterbury and Bismarck Nord burned under the atomics... The Great Horde had little to push them back by the time their sweep from Peking to the Baltic was completed in 1955

The less said about the Rape of Europe and the Purge of the New World the better... By 1985 the Zhang Su Sickness was killing more than the Rape and the Purge... Man collapsed back but Zhou had his followers and they kept building and launching Sun Burners and Biological Balloides... My wife was pulled through a portal we made to that Hawaii in 1996... She will never go back to that he'll...

cerastes

Sounds like a 2000AD spinoff

daithi1970

Micky Dolenz wrote: »

Don't talk to me about time machines. I am from the year 2125, I came back to kill a child who will grow up and be a major player in starting WWIII, nearly driving the human species to extinction.

Problem is my time machine ran out of fuel, it's a special fuel, which won't be developed for another 67 years. So I am stuck here. To be fair, it isn't all bad. Loving the retro music and movies.

Loving the music and movies from 2014?! things must be really crap in 2125 so...

seamus

mike_ie wrote: »

But even so, it would be a huge risk killing Hitler as a baby - for better or worse, he was probably the most important figure of the 20th century and although his death would have prevented the deaths of tens of millions more, his life has affected billions in ways too unpredictable to speculate accurately about.

In terms of time travel theory and the grandfather paradox, the one thing to remember is that you are the product of the fusion of a specific sperm cell with a specific egg, at a specific time.
If you change any of the conditions in which your parents found them in, even down to the minutest detail - your Dad took 22 thrusts to come rather than 21 - and you will never have existed. There is no soul floating around waiting to be inserted into a body. If a different sperm cell meets the same egg, then a different individual emerges and it's not you.

In effect, any change you make anywhere in the world before you were conceived has the potential to cease your existence. So sending someone back in time to kill Hitler would cause about 95% of the current world population to cease to exist. They'd be replaced by others, obviously, but that's not the same thing

Which leads into one of the theories whereby it's not possible to travel back before your lifetime because just setting foot in the timeline automatically creates a grandfather paradox. In theory.

smcgiff

seamus wrote: »

your Dad took 22 thrusts to come rather than 21 -

Thanks for that mental image!

Micky Dolenz

22 thrusts only??

no wonder Mammy was always so angry.

Wurzelbert

Shiraz 4.99 wrote: »

So I've done the impossible, built a machine to allow me travel back in time to Austria say 1890, I walk into his nursery & shot baby Hitler in the face.

Judge me, am I a baby murderer or a saviour of millions ?.
Is there a definitive answer ?.

yes there is: a baby murderer.
killing hitler would not have prevented ww2 just like any german action pre 1914 could not really have prevented ww1.
history as we know it - written by the winners - is far too “hitler-centric” and generally overly anti-german, is ultimately really just “a set of lies agreed upon”...
the elimination of germany as a major power - and the last major nation in the (western) world standing in the way of complete supranational control of the world economy by a small international (mainly anglo-american) elite - had been decided on long before ww1; and war was the obvious means to achieve that, with or without the kaiser or, for that matter, adolf hitler 25 years later.
once it became clear that ww1 and the subsequent breaking-up and subjugation of germany had not been enough to ensure the “finis germaniae”, another war against germany was basically decided upon.
today that “new world order” goal set over a century ago has largely been achieved...international elites rule the world, the germans are being kept “fat and happy” (was it churchill who said it?), are allowed to live on and prosper so they remain able to finance the eu and many others, yet are also being kept down, i.e. militarily and politically powerless, completely spineless and full of - systematically sustained - self-hatred to make sure they stay that way. i know that is not the version of history taught nowadays - for obvious reasons - but it is nevertheless the sad truth...
basically, what i am trying to say is this: do not focus on hitler so much, try to see the big(ger) picture and let that baby live...

Potatoeman

seamus wrote: »

You have to remember that the US and Soviets were Allies in WWII. So Germany could not have progressed eastwards without many significant battles - USSR, China & Japan. No doubt most of the other big Asian countries would have put up a strong fight too. Hitler's biggest mistake was going eastwards at all, he should have stopped at Ukraine and focussed on Europe.
.

Russia and Germany had a non-aggression pact before Germany attacked so they could have pushed on the UK and not had a scond front until the west was secured. They even could have got Japan to push from the East if they guaranteed oil supplies under an alliance.

NyOmnishambles

Wossack wrote: »

thats just a possible future, and now hasnt happened

if we've no hoverboards, and self lacing Nike runners next year, you can blame that git McFly for feckin over Biff

ScumLord wrote: »

The hoverboard has arrived!

Actually the shoes should be a reality by then also
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/02/17/power-laces-back-to-future/5549043/

Turns out back to the future was actually a prophecy and not the genial comedy we all thought

They will have to be quick with some more jaws sequels though

Tony EH

Potatoeman wrote: »

Russia and Germany had a non-aggression pact before Germany attacked so they could have pushed on the UK and not had a scond front until the west was secured. They even could have got Japan to push from the East if they guaranteed oil supplies under an alliance.

Was never going to happen though. Hitler's heart simply wasn't in an invasion of Britain and the Wehrmacht didn't have the resources to carry it out, even if it wasn't a complete non-starter.

The idea behind the "non-aggression" pact was to take Russia out of the equation, once Britain and France had started their sabre rattling in 1939. It was conjured up to try and make Britain lose her nerve. It was never really about anything to do with Russia, in a direct sense.

Hitler figured, quite correctly, that Britain and France wouldn't dare try anything in a practical sense in Europe, if the great bear wasn't on their side and in the end they didn't really do anything much after declaring war. Eight months passed after September 1939 and besides a small interlude in Norway, it took Germany to make the move, before Britain and France got committed any real way.

As far as Japan was concerned, they were far too stretched in the Pacific to commit any troops to a significant attack on Russia from the east. Hitler's declaration of war on the US in 1941 had the hope in getting Japan to respond in kind with an attack on Russia and having the Axis powers draw down on a common enemy. Unfortunately for Hitler, Japan had simply no interest in attacking Russia, nor, more importantly, did she have the capacity to.