Part 30

"You also worked on turbines and other complicated and confidential structural problems on the warship?"

"Yes."

"And you kept those blueprints overnight, too?"

"Sometimes--not often. Sometimes I left them in my tool box overnight."

Woulters, during the latter period of construction on the "Brooklyn" and the "Honolulu" had got two jobs which most workers do not like. He had the four to midnight and the midnight to eight A.M. watches. Normally Woulters likes to stay at home with his wife.

"While you had these watch duties you had pretty much the run of the ship?"

He hesitated and weighed his words carefully before answering. Finally he nodded and added hastily, "But no one can get on board."

"I didn't ask that. Did you have the run of the ship while everybody else was asleep when you were on watch?"

"Yes," he said in a low voice.

"How did you happen to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard?"

"Oh, I don't know. I like to work for the Government."

"Have you a bank account?"

"Yes."

"What bank?"

"Oh, I don't know, it's some place on Church Avenue."

"You have about 2,400 dollars in the bank, a nice apartment, and you and your wife went on a trip to Germany last year. Did you save all that money in so short a time on wages of forty dollars a week?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Your bank account does not show withdrawals sufficient to cover the trip to Germany--"

"Say," he interrupted excitedly as soon as he saw where the question was leading, "when I was called before the Dies Committee, the Congressman there shook hands with me and asked me if I knew anything about un-American activities in the Navy Yard. I told him I didn't and he told me to go back to work and not to say anything about having been called before them. Now I do not understand why you ask me all these questions. The Congressman told me not to talk and I am saying nothing more. Nothing."

The Dies Congressional Committee was not interested in these three men whom they had subpoenaed and then, oddly enough, refused to question. Besides this very strange procedure by a Committee empowered by the Congress to investigate subversive activities, the Dies Committee withheld for months documentary evidence of Nazi activities in this country directed from Germany. The Committee obtained letters to Guenther Orgell and Peter Gissibl, but quietly placed them in their files without telling anyone about the existence of these documents. They did not subpoena or question the men involved.

The letters the Committee treated so cavalierly are from E.A. Vennekohl in charge of the foreign division of the Volksbund fuer das Deutschtum im Ausland with headquarters in Berlin, letters from the foreign division headquarters in Stuttgart, and from Orgell to Gissibl.

Gissibl was in constant touch with Nazi propaganda headquarters in Germany, receiving instructions and reporting not only on general activities, but especially upon the opening by the Nazis here of schools for children in which Nazi propaganda would be disseminated.

The letters, freely translated, follow. The first is dated October 29, 1937, and was sent by Orgell from his home at Great Kills, S.I.:

Dear Mr. Gissibl:

Many thanks for your prompt reply. My complaint that one cannot get an answer from Chicago refers to the time prior to May, 1937.

I assume from your writing that it is not opportune any more to deliver further books to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, etc.

The material which Mr. Balderman received came from the V.D.A. It has been sent to our Central Book distributing place (Mirbt). If he wishes he can get more any time; that is, if you recommend it.

The thirty books for your Theodore Koerner School, which arrived this summer (via the German Consulate General in Chicago), also came from the V.D.A. If you need more first readers or study books, please write directly to me. Your request then goes immediately--without the official way via the Consulate and Foreign Office--to our Central Book distributing place. Please say how many you need and what else beside the first readers and primers you need. I will take care that it will be promptly attended to. Fritz Kuhn, of course, has to be informed of your request and has to give his okay....