Part 28

"I think he's retired. I think he used to be a butcher."

"You don't know very much about a man's business and you travel all this distance to give him money to save for you when there are banks all around? Why do you do that?"

"Oh, I don't know. It seems to me that it is better that way."

Later when I asked Nordenholz, he denied that Dieckhoff had ever given him any money to hold.

Dieckhoff had worked on turbines, gear reductions and other complicated mechanical parts on the cruiser "Brooklyn." The moment I asked him if he handled blueprints he answered in the affirmative, but quickly added that the blueprints were returned every night and locked up by the officers. A capable machinist could, he admitted, after careful study remember the blueprints well enough to make a duplicate copy.

"When you went to Germany after working on the destroyers did anyone ever question you about them over there?"

"No," he said quickly. "Nobody."

"My information is that you did talk about structural matters."

He looked startled. "Well," he said, "my brother knew I worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We talked about it, naturally."

"My information is that you talked about it with other people, too."

He stared out of the window with a worried air. Finally he said, "Well, my brother has a friend and I talked with him about it."

"A minute ago you said you had not talked about it with anyone."

"I had forgotten."

"This is the brother who gave you money to travel around in Germany?"

He didn't answer.

"I didn't hear you," I said.

"Yes," Dieckhoff said finally, "he gave me the money."

I called upon the second of the three suspected spies subpoenaed by the Dies Committee. Alfred Boldt had done very responsible work on the U.S. cruiser "Honolulu." Though he had not been in Germany for ten years, he suddenly got enough money last year to go there and to send his son to school at a Nazi academy. Boldt, too, has no bank account. He needed a minimum of seven hundred dollars for his wife and himself to cross third class, but the Dies Committee was not interested in where the money for the trip had come from.

Boldt left for Germany on August 4, 1936, and returned September 12. On the evening I dropped in to see him, he was tensely nervous. He had heard that someone had been around to talk with Dieckhoff.

"I understand your only son, Helmuth, is going to school in Langin, Germany?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "I sent him there two years ago."

"No schools in the United States for a fifteen-year-old boy?"

"I wanted him to learn German."

"What do you pay for his schooling over there?"

He hesitated. His wife, who was sitting with us and occasionally advising him in German, suddenly interrupted in German, "Don't tell him. That's German business."

I assume they did not know that I understood, for Boldt passed off her comment as if he had not heard it and said casually, "Oh, twenty-five dollars a month."

"You earn forty dollars a week at the Navy Yard, pay for your son's schooling in Germany, clothes, etc., and you and your wife took more than a month's trip to Germany last year. How do you do it on forty a week?"

His wife giggled a little in the adjoining room. Boldt shrugged his shoulder without answering.