For the first 49 years of my life, I wondered how the Holocaust could have happened.

[moondust]

9. People Aren't Smart Enough

From 2012.

~
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas.
~
People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

I've wondered about it for 50+ years. Germans were/are "smart" people. I lived in Berlin for more than a year in the 70s and rode the nice subways sometimes late at night without any worries about crime or anything. Everything seemed pretty normal and "advanced" inside the Wall. Of course there were also some greedy outsiders like Prescott Bush and Fred Koch who are partly to blame for the rise of the Nazis.