New film examining IRA kidnap and murder of German factory manager that destroyed a whole family

In the years that followed the brutal IRA murder of the 45-year-old German factory manager in west Belfast, a tsunami of grief overwhelmed the loved ones left behind.

The pain of the loss was compounded by the cruelty of those who kidnapped Mr Niedermayer from his family home during the 1973 Christmas holiday – refusing to let his wife and two daughters know he had been killed within days of being abducted, and that his body had been dumped, face down, in a nearby rubbish tip.

In a compelling new film, ‘Face Down’, the full horror of what was first and foremost an enduring family tragedy is laid bare, with first-hand accounts of how Thomas’s wife Ingeborg succumbed to her grief by taking her own life 10 years later.

The devastation continued with both of the couple’s daughters, Renate and Gabrielle, taking their own lives within four years of their mother’s death. The ripple effect continued with Gabrielle’s widowed husband Robin Williams-Powell killing himself in 1999.

The string of human tragedies has hung over Gabrielle’s daughters like a curse for decades.

On camera, Rachel Williams-Powell gives an emotive account of how she “ran away” to her new life in Australia as soon as she had completed her university studies “to escape everything that had happened to us”.

She said: “I never thought I’d get to this age – my family don’t live beyond 40.”

Tanya Williams-Powell, who now lives in Devon, said the murder of her grandfather – whose Grundig factory was providing jobs for the local community in Belfast – was particularly tragic as he “cared so much for the plant, and he cared so much for the people”.

The kidnapping plot was said to have been put together by notorious IRA commander Brian Keenan, who was a union shop steward at the factory at the time.

Keenan had hoped that the hostage situation could be used to put pressure on the government to transfer IRA prisoners, including Dolours and Marian Price, to prisons in Northern Ireland.

In 1980, an RUC informant within the IRA revealed to his handler that Mr Niedermayer had attempted to escape his captors and was pistol-whipped to death, with his body being left face down in the nearby Colin Glen rubbish dump and covered over.

Former senior detective Alan Simpson also recalls how police search teams, posing as members of an environmental improvement organisation in order to protect the source of the information, spent weeks removing tons of rubbish until the remains of Mr Niedermayer were recovered.

Also in the film, former Special Branch officer Dr William Matchett asks why the IRA felt the need to compound the family’s grief by keeping his fate a secret.

He said: “Niedermayer was living among the people. He was a good man, but a good man was a soft target.”

l Produced and written by David Blake Knox, ‘Face Down’ is showing in the QFT in Belfast until Thursday, August 17.