Imagine a real-life version of “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s quixotic movie about Jewish avengers in World War II — but in this case involving a plot by a band of refugees to kill millions of Germans just after the war by poisoning their water supply.
The plot, which targeted five major cities in retribution for the Holocaust, failed. So did the conspirators’ Plan B, which followed in mid-April 1946: to murder 12,000 captured SS officers — members of the very unit that enforced the Nazis’ reign of terror and ran the death camps — by lacing their bread rations with arsenic.