In their cells, sallow and shoeless, the monsters seemed so ordinary.

Julius Streicher, the Jew-hating newspaper publisher.

Hermann Göring, the Fuhrer's barbarous right-hand man and Luftwaffe chief.

Rudolf Höss, the bloodthirsty Auschwitz commandant.

Hans Heinz Triest could approach them at will -- sit on their cots, hear their lies and complaints.

He was 23 in 1945, a German Jew who had gotten out in time, gone to the United States, renamed himself Howard, returned with military intelligence, then stayed to translate for Nuremberg war-crimes psychiatrists.

What warped instinct drove such unremarkable men to engineer such unimaginable horror? Surely there was a twisted common thread, a baseline pathology.

He'd help them find it.

Triest is 86 now, a Delray Beach retiree whose story has been made into a documentary. On Thursday, he told it again, to the U.S. Justice Department's top Nazi hunter.

They met at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Hollywood, where Eli Rosenbaum, who heads the department's Office of Special Investigations, interviewed Triest for three hours -- by turns awestruck, chilled and amused.

It has been 64 years since the war ended, but OSI's mission continues. Criminals must be punished, said Rosenbaum, 54, a towering and passionate man.

``Those of us who work on human rights prosecutions get a lot of inspiration from the men and women who pioneered the pursuit of justice at Nuremberg. It's always an enormous thrill to meet the people who actually did it. It helps us learn. . .what propels people to commit heinous crimes.''

Triest ``actually questioned the monsters,'' Rosenbaum marvelled, and as such, helps protect historical truths from Holocaust deniers.

``I always get the question: `How could you sit with these people, talk to them, shake hands, knowing in the case of Höss that he probably ordered the killing of your parents?''

Howard Triest speaks in strong, measured tones. Every date, every locale, every one of the murderers' outrageous denials, he remembers.

He's still amazed that after the war and the tribunals, when the army put him in charge of de-Nazification in his hometown of Munich -- the Third Reich's holy city -- it was impossible to find a Nazi.

Not me, they would tell him. I knew nothing. I saw nothing.

They were like children caught being naughty, he said: full of excuses.

``They all thought they were imprisoned by mistake. . .`We received our orders.' ''

They blamed the dead, said Triest: Adolf Hitler, who committed suicide on the eve of Germany's surrender, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who did likewise once arrested.

BORN IN MUNICH

Howard Triest was born in 1923 in Munich, where his family had lived for generations, assimilated Reform Jews who, like most of their sophisticated, urban peers, defined themselves first as Germans, second as Jews.

His father was Berthold, a decorated World War I veteran who owned a clothing factory before the Holocaust. His mother, Lina, was known as Ly. He had a sister, Margot, six years his junior, and two grandparents.

Berthold, Ly and paternal grandfather Moritz Triest died during the war; Margot and maternal grandmother Rosa Westheimer survived.

After an odyssey through Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France, Howard left Europe on Aug. 31, 1939, destined for Detroit. War broke out the next day.

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