Thomas Niedermayer, OBE (8 March 1928 – 27 December 1973) was a German industrialist who was kidnapped by the Provisional IRA in December 1973. He died from a violent attack in their custody before being buried secretly. Niedermayer was the managing director of the Grundig factory in Belfast and the West German honorary consul for Northern Ireland.^[1]

Background

Niedermayer was born into a working-class family in 1928 in the city of Bamberg in Bavarian Franconia. After leaving school, he worked as an aircraft mechanic in Friedrichshafen and Karlsruhe. He retrained as a toolmaker and was a foreman at eighteen. In 1952, he married Ingeborg Tramowsky, also from Bamberg, born into a refugee family from former German East Prussia. In the following year, he took an initial step on the management ladder when he became assistant to the company director of an electronics firm. In 1955, aged just twenty-seven, he entered higher management at the Nuremberg headquarters of Grundig, then one of the major names in consumer electronics in Europe and in 1961, he moved with his family to be the general manager of that company’s new plant in Belfast, the first it had established outside Germany.^[2]

Abduction

Niedermayer was kidnapped on 27 December 1973, at around 11 pm, from his home in the Glengoland area of Suffolk in West Belfast. Two IRA members lured him outside his house on the pretext that they had accidentally crashed into his car. The abduction incident was witnessed by his younger daughter, who had answered the door to them.

The Government of the United Kingdom denied at the time that it had received any subsequent demands from the IRA in relation to the kidnapping. However, several years later it was revealed that it had and had briefly attempted to negotiate, with the IRA seeking the transferal from imprisonment in Great Britain to Northern Ireland of two of its members, sisters Dolours Price and Marion Price, who had been jailed for involvement in a bombing campaign in London in 1973. The negotiations had ended abruptly from the IRA's side without explanation.^[3]

In March 1980, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, acting on information received, located Niedermayer's body lying face down, with hands tied and gagged, in a shallow grave at an illegal rubbish dump at Colin Glen. A forensic examination revealed that the cause of death had been severe injuries sustained to the head after being pistol-whipped with a handgun.

His funeral took place at Dunmurry and he was buried in the church's graveyard.^[4]

Criminal trial and after

Eugene McManus (IRA Belfast Brigade Adjutant in 1973) and 42-year-old John Bradley (also an IRA member) were charged in connection with the crime. Bradley was originally charged with murder, but at his trial in 1981 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, stating that he had accidentally killed Niedermayer whilst he was trying to escape. McManus pleaded guilty to withholding information about the crime and IRA membership. Bradley was subsequently sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, and McManus to five years' imprisonment.

Information later obtained by the Royal Ulster Constabulary revealed that the kidnapping operation had been set in motion by Brian Keenan, a former employee at the Belfast Grundig factory that Niedermayer had been the Director of, where Keenan, as a Trade Union representative, had had several confrontations with Niedermayer.^[5]

Subsequent events

Niedermayer's wife, Ingeborg, returned to Ireland in 1990, ten years to the day after her husband's funeral, and booked into a hotel in Bray, where she died by suicide by walking into the sea from an isolated beach.^[6] Niedermayer's two daughters, Renate and Gabrielle, also died by suicide, in 1991 and 1994 respectively, with Renate dying in South Africa and Gabrielle in England. Gabrielle's husband, Robin Williams-Powell, killed himself five years later in 1999.^[7] Gabrielle and Robin are survived by their two daughters, Tanya and Rachel.^[8]

The story is the subject of the 2023 documentary film Face Down, directed by Gerry Gregg. ^[9]