Niedermayer murder: ‘People say there should be no hierarchy of victims – but I don’t accept that’

In ‘The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer,’ David Blake Knox explores how an entirely innocent family was destroyed when the IRA murdered the German factory manager in December 1973.

The kidnapping of the 45-year-old father of two was intended to secure the transfer of IRA prisoners, including Dolours and Marian Price, to prisons in Northern Ireland.

Newspaper reports from the time show that two men had called at the Niedermayer home late on December 27 claiming to have hit his car.

However, when he came out to investigate he was bundled into another vehicle and driven away.

It was seven years before Mr Niedermayer’s body was recovered from an illegal rubbish dump not far from where he was snatched. A post-mortem examination revealed he had been pistol-whipped about the head by his IRA captors.

The profound grief had a lasting impact on his wife and two daughters.

In 1990, widow Ingeborg killed herself 10 years after her husband’s funeral. Both daughters – Renate and Gabrielle – would die by suicide over the next four years.

Author David Blake Knox told the News Letter his initial interest in the story was sparked by an RTE radio documentary made by Joe Duffy – leading him to conduct his own in-depth research.

“I felt that the story, for a number of reasons, deserved to be told,” he said.

“It is quite an extreme case at one level, because it destroyed an entire family, but it had some similarities with the whole history of the Troubles.

“I worked as a current affairs producer for RTE during the 1980s and I saw a lot of similarities between the experiences the Niedermayers had and people I encountered during those years who had also suffered as a result of political violence.

“Sometimes to bring wars to an end we have to accept and forgive – or at least pretend to forgive – and while I think that that’s a powerful image, I also feel it is important that victims’ experiences and victims’ trauma shouldn’t be minimised.

“And particularly in the case of the Niedermayers who had absolutely nothing to do with the historic conflict in Northern Ireland. Thomas Niedermayer helped to create jobs and promote Northern Ireland as a place where people could be gainfully employed. And there was also the fact that person who planned his kidnapping was somebody that he knew. So there are a lot of dimensions to this story.”

Mr Knox said the Niedermayer tragedy “shows how the effects of political violence can have a cascading effect, sometimes for generations,” and added: “There is little enough attention given to innocent victims who lost their lives or were maimed during the Troubles, but there is even less given to the people who survived who were connected to victims. And in their own way they are also victims.

“There is a phrase that has been used a lot – ’there should be no hierarchy of victims’ – but I don’t accept that. I think some things that were done were criminal and that individuals should take personal responsibility for that. And if you take kidnapping – kidnapping is a particularly invidious form of terror.”

The author went on to say: “One of the things that struck me very forcibly was that the IRA denied any knowledge of what had happened to Niedermayer. His body was only recovered seven years after he had been abducted, and those seven years were basically hell for his family.”

The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer is published by New Island Books priced £13.99