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TIL of people of Jewish decent that served in the German Army in WW2. They ranged from Generals who were declared to be Aryans, waffen SS soldiers who hid the fact knowing their fellow soldiers would probably kill them to ordinary soldiers basically hiding from being sent to concentration camps.

jNKeX TIL of the "The Norwegian Rocket Incident", when in 1995, Russian officials briefly misinterpreted a Norwegian scientific rocket to be a nuclear attack. It showed the dangers of accidental nuclear war even when the threat of military confrontation between the US and Russia was at an all-time low.
neDNo TIL Alice Coachmen was the first black woman to win an Olympic Gold Medal at the 1948 Summer Olympic Games in the high jump competition. She was also the first African-American woman selected to the US Olympic Team.
9mVm TIL that Emperor Nero competed in the Olympic Games. Nero did terribly and was nearly killed in a chariot race, but was nonetheless declared the winner in every event he competed in.
PY6yV TIL that the evidence that showed the Columbia Space Shuttle was "safe" for re-entry were results using debris 600 times smaller than the one that broke off the Shuttle. This information was "hidden" in plain sight, in a single PowerPoint slide, which may have led to the fatal decision.
57jn TIL that a series of experiments by psychologists at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Toronto showed that upper class people are less charitable and more likely to cheat.