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.
"The cheapest the two of you could do it, third class, would be about
seven hundred dollars. Where do you have your bank account?"
"No. No bank account," his wife interrupted sharply.
"All the money is kept here, right here in this house," he laughed.
"You saved all that money in cash?"
"Yes; in cash, right here."
"No banks?"
"We like it better like that--in cash."
Boldt, like Dieckhoff, had been a marine engineer on the North German
Lloyd. He went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1931. When the
cruiser "Honolulu" made its trial run in the spring of 1938, Boldt was
on board.
Like Dieckhoff and Boldt, Harry Woulters, _alias_ Hugo Woulters, the
third of the three subpoenaed men, is a naturalized citizen of German
extraction. He went to work in the Navy Yard within one day of
Dieckhoff. Before that, both had worked on the same four American
destroyers at the Staten Island Shipbuilding Company.
The house where Woulters lives has a great many Jews in it, judging
from the names on the letterboxes, and since Hugo sounded too German,
he listed his first name as "Harry."
"You and Dieckhoff worked on the same destroyers on Staten Island and
you say you never met him there?" I asked.
"No, I never met him until the second day after I went to work in the
Navy Yard."
"How many people work on a destroyer--a thousand?"
"Oh, no. Not that many."
"About one hundred?"
"About that," he said uncertainly.
"And you worked with Dieckhoff
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