When Arno Mayer joined the Army in 1944 after fleeing France from Nazi clutches, he expected to exact revenge on the regime later responsible for the genocide of his Jewish family. Riding on a bus with other trepidation-filled young Jewish soldiers, Mayer braced himself to arrive at an airfield, to be shipped to Europe to fight battles against the Nazis in the waning war. Instead, Mayer, with a select group of other German-speaking soldiers, were taken to a place their superiors called “nothing”: a place hidden from sight and from the world. “Nothing” was really a clearing in the woods,...