The wooden building looked like something out of a child’s drawing: a squat rectangle topped by a pitched roof, with a darkened window on either side of the central door. It stood at the edge of a forest clearing, fringed by towering hardwood trees. Herbert Brucker clutched a .45-caliber Colt automatic pistol in his hand as he entered the building one day in the fall of 1943. The tall, lean 21-year-old had two magazines—12 bullets. Behind him, just out of his sightline, a man in a mask followed. Inside, it…
