Howard H. Triest—born Hans Heinz on March 29, 1923, in Munich, Germany—grew up in a close, multi-generational Jewish family with his younger sister Margot. His father, Berthold Triest, owned a successful Herrenwäsche (men’s clothing) factory producing shirts, pajamas, and dressing gowns and employing more than one hundred people; his mother, Ly Triest, managed the household with domestic help. The family vacationed frequently within Germany and abroad and, like many of their peers, considered themselves “real Germans”—Germans of Jewish religion whose men had served honorably in World War I.

In 1929, during one of Berthold’s business trips to the United States, six-year-old Hans stayed with his mother and sister at the fashionable Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth in Feldafing on Lake Starnberg (Starnberger See). Decades later, in 2006, while in Munich for a film festival, Howard and his wife Anita revisited the hotel and lunched on the same porch he remembered from childhood—an echo of a life that existed before catastrophe.

Nazi rule ended that world. Howard celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in April 1936 at Munich’s Main Synagogue (built 1887), which the Nazis condemned as a “traffic hindrance” and demolished in June 1938. During Kristallnacht in November 1938, other Jewish houses of worship in the city were burned. Howard completed a German secondary education, while Margot—under escalating anti-Jewish restrictions—was limited to Jewish schools.

On August 31, 1939, sixteen-year-old Howard left Germany, arriving in Luxembourg on September 1, the day World War II began. Two weeks later, his parents and Margot joined him there. After eight months in Diekirch, Howard secured passage on the Dutch ship SS Pennland, departing Antwerp on April 26, 1940, and reaching New York Harbor on May 16, 1940. His parents and Margot had planned to sail from Rotterdam on May 10, 1940—the morning the German army invaded the Netherlands and Belgium—foreclosing their escape. Berthold was arrested and continually held.  Ly and Margot were left to fend for themselves and eventually, in a complicated journey made their way to France to be closer to Bertold.  In 1942, Berthold and Ly were arrested in France, separated from their daughter, and sent to Camp Drancy near Paris, and deported to Auschwitz on August 26, 1942, where they were murdered (as was Berthold’s 91-year-old father, Moritz who died in Theresienstadt). Margot survived with the help of the French Jewish rescue organization OSE; sheltered at Le Couret near Limoges, she later led ten children by night across Annemasse into Switzerland. Howard and Margot reunited briefly in Switzerland in the spring of 1945, when he obtained compassionate leave.

Drafted into the U.S. Army, Howard landed at Omaha Beach on D+1 as a machine-gunner replacement, but his fluent German and a turn of circumstance led to reassignment to Military Intelligence. He transferred to Fifth Corps as part of a Military Intelligence Interpretation (MII) team and re-entered Germany in December 1944, barely five years after fleeing as a teenager. By April 1945, his unit had participated in the liberation of Buchenwald and linked up with the Soviet Army at Torgau on the Elbe River. Near the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp, a Czech liaison officer transporting liberated citizens to Plzeň carried a list of Howard’s relatives; he returned twenty-four hours later with Howard’s grandmother, Rosa (Westheimer), imprisoned since 1942 and emaciated by sixty-five pounds, but alive. (Other branches of the family survived as well; one daughter reached Israel, and her son Kurt, a survivor of Dachau, later emigrated to the United States, as did Rosa.)

After a brief posting with the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) near Munich, Howard was transferred to Nuremberg, the site of the International Military Tribunal. As a member of the 685th Internal Security Detachment, he regularly  met with top Nazi defendants and their witnesses and served as an interpreter for the American prison psychiatrists Douglas Kelley and Leon Goldensohn. His duties brought him daily into contact with the regime’s leading figures—among them Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, Rudolf Höss, and Hans Frank—and with the defendants’ families held as witnesses. He remained in Nuremberg through the end of the trials. Howard later reflected that the proceedings were a necessary and just punishment, though they could never restore the murdered or undo the past.

His final European assignment placed him with G-2 Intelligence for Military Government, Bavaria, headquartered in Munich. The young refugee who had fled in 1939 returned in 1947 as an American intelligence officer helping supervise the denazification of villages and cities. He observed, with sober clarity, how many Germans insisted they had known nothing and borne no responsibility—a refrain of denial he encountered from ordinary citizens to top officials.

In 2003, with family and award winning filmmaker Steve Palackdharry, Brent Triest, Glenn Triest, Terry Herald, and Robert Larson, Howard helped produce the feature documentary Journey to Justice, dedicated to the memory of his parents, Ly and Berthold Triest. In later years, he and Anita took deep pride in their growing family: two sons, Brent (Nancy) and Glenn (Halina); four grandchildren, Jonathon (Jessica), Kate, Tessa, and Lena Triest; and four great-grandchildren, Shayna, Aryeh, Eliana, and Talya Triest.

Howard H. Triest died in 2016 at the age of 93. His life—survivor, American soldier, military intelligence interpreter, and witness at Nuremberg—stands as a testament to resilience, moral clarity, and the enduring demand for justice and memory.