posted
Actually, if things began to diverge in 1916 already, then pretty much everything regarding WWII should be, as Douglas Adams puts it, "almost but not completely unlike"... You know the drill.
All aspects of military escalation of the world in the 1930s hinged on the exact outcome of WWI. Eliminating Communist Russia doesn't just eliminate Stalin's/Trotsky's Red Army (or enhance it, because Stalin never got to kill all the competent officers). It also affects the outcome of the Versailles peace, and may quite well negate the war reparations issue, defer the economic depression, erase the Washington Treaty from history...
...Meddling with 1916 may well mean that the best armed nation of the 1940s is Poland, and that it's France's anti-semitic militants who launch a genocidal invasion against sionist-communist Germany!
The whole 20th century is *precarious*. Any single assassination, invasion or nuking-of-capital-city mere two hundred years prior would have made negligible impact on world history. A single altered newspaper article in the 1900s would send history spinning out of control. Unless, of course, a whole army of time-traveling meddlers was steering it...
posted
Of course, you're assuming that the Nazi timeline was the intended result. However, I got the impression that since Vosk was not responsible for the change, we don't know what the intended result was.
Indeed, if the intent was to simply throw off the founding of the Federation and destroy Daniel's group, as you point out, their enemy might have just randomly picked targets to assassinate at random and this was the unexpected but fortunate result.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
It makes life hell for the apparently human-descended, Earth-affiliated Daniels. Hence, it's 'fortunate' for his enemy, be it Vosk or the party that killed Lenin.
The T(C)W combatants were hardly interested in whether the Nazis conquered Earth or not. To promote the chaos in pre-starflight Earth was the obvious goal of all of Daniels' enemies, and the Nazis simply were the handiest tool for that. Which is a bit illogical, though - the success of the Nazi movement hinged on individual people, and any temporal meddling would endanger those people and disqualify the Nazis as a power tool.