Much to disentangle in new film about IRA abduction and killing of German in Belfast

“I suppose there are a few things that attracted me to this story.” David Blake Knox tells me. “The Niedermayers had an innocence about them. They were not identified with either side.”

Thomas Niedermayer, German manager of the Grundig electronics factory in Dunmurry, was abducted from his Belfast home just after Christmas 1973. What followed stood out as grimly confused tragedy even for that awful period. No public demands were issued. Various deranged rumours circulated. Eventually, as far as the wider public was concerned, the story became subsumed in the escalating torrents of bad news.

It took another seven years for the victim’s body to be found – following tips from an informant – beneath a rubbish dump in Colin Glen forest park. As Face Down, a new documentary produced and written by Blake Knox explains, the IRA had kidnapped Niedermayer with a mind to negotiating the return to Ireland of Dolours and Marian Price, who were serving sentences in England for a bombing campaign. Niedermayer looks to have been bludgeoned to death, perhaps following an escape attempt.

Blake Knox, who first examined the material in a 2019 book of the same title, is keen to demonstrate how such outrages spread misery through the generations. A decade after the body was found, Ingeborg Niedermayer, the victim’s widow, drowned herself off the coast of Bray. Her daughters Gabriele and Renate, who had opened the door to the kidnappers in 1973, later also took their own lives. Tanya and Rachel, the victim’s granddaughters, are on screen to process the bitter legacy.

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“They told us it was a healing experience,” Blake Knox says. “Their parents told them almost nothing about the background. I sympathise and can fully understand how it was too painful to revisit that. But silence can be quite an imposition, as can talking about something. There is no hard and fast border. I think they learnt more about their family making this. It is my belief that it’s better to know more than know less.”

That last sentence offers wider motivation for Blake Knox’s inquiry in Face Down. There is so much here to disentangle. At that stage, the IRA was always keen to “claim responsibility” for its operations. In contrast, little then seems to have emerged about the kidnapping from the usual spokespeople.

“It was partly because it had gone wrong,” Blake Knox says. “It was also probably because there was an immediate reaction by both Protestants and Catholics. Bear in mind that the workplace in the factory he [Niedermayer] managed was largely Catholic.”

This was just months after a bomb at the Abercorn Restaurant in central Belfast had killed two and injured 130.

“Most of those who suffered in that were Catholics. They denied any responsibility. In fact, they claimed it was a loyalist bomb that had gone off. It is now generally accepted that it was planted by the IRA. So there were these certain situations where they felt – this is my opinion, obviously – either it had revealed their incompetence or it revealed that their own community had suffered excessively. The kidnapping of Niedermayer was extremely unpopular within the Grundig workforce.”

[ Face Down: A gripping, properly enraging account of the IRA’s murder of Thomas Niedermayer ]

Blake Knox, a veteran producer who has worked for RTÉ, the BBC and HBO, also feels that journalists bear responsibility for the fug of confusion and lies that hung over the Niedermayer case.

“It struck me how gullible some journalists had been about the incident,” he says. “There was pretty consistent, deliberate disinformation by the IRA. That was followed by an awful lot of really quite reputable, experienced journalists who didn’t seem to ask themselves the question: have they anything to gain by telling me this version of events? Some of this was very hurtful and distressing to the family.”

Blake Knox notes that false stories emerged suggesting Niedermayer had been involved with gunrunning. It was said he had run off with another woman.

Thomas Niedermayer was referred to consistently as an industrialist, as some kind plutocrat, who was in an exploitative position in some way. His Germanness reinforced that idea

—  David Blake Knox

“There was one thing I thought was particularly crass,” he says. “He was German, and William Craig, an anti-Sunningdale politician, had a German wife. In the crudest way possible, people thought: Oh, Niedermayer must have been having an affair with another German, and Craig, who did have contacts with the world of loyalist paramilitarism, therefore punished him by getting his loyalist friends to abduct him. Some of the stories that were printed were incredibly detailed – and they were all completely untrue.”

Niedermayer emerges as a gentle family man who took to life in Northern Ireland with quiet enthusiasm. Blake Knox takes some umbrage at the portrayal of him as some sort of tycoon. This was the era when European magnates were at risk of kidnapping by Marxist brigades. However, although he did act as honorary consul for West Germany, Niedermayer was not any sort of capitalist bigwig.

“Niedermayer was referred to consistently as an industrialist, as some kind plutocrat, who was in an exploitative position in some way,” he says. “His Germanness reinforced that idea. He was ‘a foreign capitalist’. The reality was that that he came from a working-class background. His father was a car mechanic. He left school at 14.”

The later sections of Face Down – named, chillingly, for how Niedermayer was buried – have much to do with the late Brian Keenan (not to be confused with the writer of the same name who was kidnapped in Beirut in the 1980s). A sometime member of the IRA army council, Keenan, who had been a trade union representative at Grundig, is believed to have planned the kidnap.

“At that time the IRA were fighting a so-called economic war,” Blake Knox says. “Brian Keenan played a major part. They were issuing statements about targeting local representatives of multinational capitalist imperialism. This included a woman whose dad owned a shop called Alley Cats. To conceive of these people as agents of international capitalism was ludicrous.”

[ A killing 40 years ago that still echoes though a family ]

In the 1990s, Keenan came to be associated with the drift towards what became the Belfast Agreement. “There wouldn’t be a peace process if it wasn’t for Brian Keenan,” Gerry Adams remarked. At least one contributor to Face Down expresses some scepticism about Keenan’s conversion, however.

“One of the big questions about Keenan is this apparent volte face,” Blake Knox says. “In this one interpretation, a man of war becomes a man of peace, and beats the sword into a ploughshare. To be honest, I think that’s quite a naive interpretation of Keenan. Keenan was really a highly committed activist. On the other hand, he spent 12 years in prison. When he got out, the situation that changed radically.”

By that stage, the conflict, Blake Knox suggests, looked to be unwinnable by either side. “I don’t think he became a ‘man of peace’ – because that has suggestion of some kind of moral conversion. Which I just don’t believe.”

Directed adroitly by Gerry Gregg, Face Down is as much a personal story as a political one. It talks us through Ingeborg Niedermayer’s difficult early years as a refugee. It notes how she stubbornly refused to leave Northern Ireland until her husband’s body was found. And it reaches a qualified redemption at the close as Tanya and Rachel connect with their family’s legacy of tears.

“They were an innocent family,” Blake Knox says of the earlier generation. “It was almost as if they had stumbled into a domestic dispute and, in one way or another, all of them ended up dead.”

Face Down is in cinemas now.