‘Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to the air waves. Before his radio broad cast was cut off, he warned his countrymen that their führer could well be a verführer, or misleader. Bonhoeffer ’s anti-Nazism lasted until the end of his life in 1945, when he was executed by the regime for association with the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Even while imprisoned, he kept thinking about the origins of the political mania that had overtaken Germany. The force of central importance to Hitler’s rise was not evil, he concluded, but stupidity.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than mal ice,” Bon ho ef fer wrote in a letter to his co-conspirators on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship. “One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.” When provoked, “the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”…’

(Colin Marshall via Open Culture)