Earlier this month I saw Face Down, a powerful and heartbreaking documentary by the Dublin film-maker Gerry Gregg about the IRA’s 1973 murder of Thomas Niedermayer, the German manager of an electronics factory on the edge of west Belfast.
The script was by David Blake Knox, a former RTE producer who had written a 2019 book about the case. In the words of a senior RUC investigating officer in the film, Niedermayer and the terrible circumstances of his death and its aftermath have been “absolutely, utterly forgotten”.
Niedermayer was an entirely innocent and uninvolved bystander in the Northern Ireland conflict, and he certainly believed he was safe because of that.
Niedermayer was an entirely innocent and uninvolved bystander in the Northern Ireland conflict, and he certainly believed he was safe because of that.
A former aircraft mechanic, he had come to Belfast in the early 1960s to manage the Grundig factory in Dunmurry, which had created over 1,000 jobs in this unemployment blackspot (it closed after its former manager’s funeral in 1980). He was also the honorary West German consul in the city.
He was highly regarded in the Grundig plant by management and workers alike; one worker who spoke to the BBC called it “a model factory” where “Catholics and Protestants can work equally together.”
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