The IRA kidnapping and killing of a German businessman from his home in west Belfast 50 years ago is told in a new documentary.
The RTÉ programme looks at how Thomas Niedermayer’s death cast a long shadow over his devastated family with two relatives visiting Northern Ireland for the first time in a bid to discover what really happened.
An event is due to be held in Lisburn on Friday to mark the 50th anniversary of Mr Niedermayer’s death.
The “reflective” service, to be held at the Island Civic Centre, has been organised by the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF).
It said they will be “remembering and celebrating the man Thomas was and honouring his family - his wife Ingeborg, his daughters Gabrielle and Renate and son-in-law Robin, who also all died before their time”.
Mr Niedermayer was abducted from his west Belfast bungalow on December 27 1973.
The IRA had planned to use the businessman - who was the Honorary German Consulate - to try to negotiate the transfer home of sisters Dolours and Marian Price, jailed in England for their part in a bombing campaign in London.
IRA leader Brian Keenan, who had worked at Grundig’s factory in Dunmurry, is thought to have planned the kidnap.
The businessman’s wife Ingeborg and two daughters waited for the kidnappers’ demands, but none came.
Niedermayer became one of the ‘disappeared’, with the IRA denying any responsibility.
However, in 1980 an informant revealed the location of the body to the RUC, hidden beneath a rubbish dump just a few hundred yards from his family home at Glen Colin forest park.
He had suffered severe head injuries, but because of the passage of time it was not possible to determine his exact cause of death.
In June 1990, Mrs Niedermayer returned to Ireland, booked into a hotel in Bray, Co Wicklow, and walked into the sea. Her body was found washed up on a beach a few days later.
Her daughter Renate, who had opened the door to her father’s killers and woken him from his sleep, moved to South Africa and within a year of her mother’s death, she had also taken her own life.
Gabriele, the elder of his two children, also died by suicide, while a few years later her husband took his own life.
In the RTÉ documentary, Face Down: The Disappearance of Thomas Niedermayer, his death and the impact on his family is examined from the perspective of two of his grand-daughters.
From the book of the same name by David Black, the programme talks to Tanya and Rachel, who were unaware of their family’s troubled past.
It was only after the suicides of both their parents that they came upon a box filled with Irish newspapers from the 1970s and began to discover the truth of the Niedermayers’ history in Ireland.
In the documentary, the two sisters “confront for the first time what really happened in Belfast all those years ago”.
“They reveal the long-term damage that political violence has inflicted on their family – crossing countries and continents as well as successive generations,” the programme states.
“The sisters are determined that the trauma they inherited will end with them and not be passed on to their own children.”
Face Down: The disappearance of Thomas Niedermayer is on RTÉ One on Wednesday at 9.35pm or stream on RTÉ Player.
