TRAGIC FAMILY: Thomas and Ingeborg Niedermayer with their daughters Renate (front) and Gabrielle, all are now dead

I’ve written more than my fair share on Trump, son of Jesus (really, his father Fred had the middle name Christ) and, with just four days until the US decides whether to vote for a woman with a permanent ear to-ear-smile and no known policies or a convicted felon/lying shit/bankrupt/would-be dictator, I’ve decided to give it a rest. (Next week, however, I may reporting on the remake of the American Civil War)

 

Instead I go back to the two years I spent as the most junior of junior reporters on the News Letter, one of two morning papers in Belfast. It was a brilliant learning curve and because of my tender years I was chosen to cover the first time both the Beatles and the Stones (and others whom my news editor classified as having dubious hair length) arrived in the city to perform. So, along with reviews of their concerts, I interviewed all four Beatles and a delightful Mick Jagger sans PR lackeys or other chicanes in the way of a good story.

 

My daily pint/s in the Duke of York next door to the office were served by a nice wee fella called Gerry Adams before the beard, dark glasses, beret and  coffin on his shoulder. Least memorable at the time was an interview in 1965 when I was sent to Grundig, the German electronics firm which four years earlier had set up a factory in the city.

 

And there I met the general manager Thomas Niedermayer, a quiet German who had worked his way up from the shop floor (a toolmaker though not the son of one) to start the factory in the city. He made a great success of his task, growing the workforce from 300 in the first year to more than 2,000 within a decade.

 

But it was his back story which interested me most because he had been a 12-year-old child conscript to the Nazi Party in Bavaria and his wife Ingeborg had fled to Bavaria from German East Prussia and the oncoming Red Army. She had lost all but one of her eight siblings to the war and as a result, not surprisingly, she suffered from depression.

 

By the time I met Niedermayer he was also serving as honorary German Consul to Northern Ireland and by any standards he had made a great success of his new life. Crucially in a province riven by sectarianism he ensured that Grundig was open to all religions and allegiances. It was on these few basic facts that I built my story and I suppose I never really thought about this thoroughly decent man again.

 

Until... in 1973 he was kidnapped by the IRA.

 

At the time I was an occasional back bencher on the Mail under David English. I gave what I knew to a reporter in the office and the rest was left to the Belfast fireman sent over from the Manchester office, as was the way back then.

 

At first the Provisionals denied all knowledge of the crime but they soon abandoned that lie and, true to form, the British government went along with it, denying that demands been made for his return. In fact poor Niedermayer had been taken from his home in West Belfast on the day after Boxing Day by two men luring him out on the pretence that they had hit his car parked outside.

 

That was all it took, no initial violence, just a lie. And despite what the Heath government said, he was the bargaining chip for the freedom of sisters Delours and Marion Price, jailed for their part in a bombing campaign in London.

 

Nothing more was known of Niedermayer’s fate until seven years later when his body was found, face down, in a shallow grave in Colin Glen, ironically a beauty spot not far from his home and now one of Ireland’s most popular adventure parks. And all that time Ingeborg and her two teenage daughters Renate and Gabrielle had to get on with their lives.

 

But brutal acts have consequences and never so more cruelly than for Ingeborg, Renate and Gabrielle. They didn’t know it but Thomas was dead just three days after being taken. Thomas had tried to escape only to be butted on the head with a pistol, tied up and gagged. He choked and died of a heart attack.

 

Ingeborg, more frail than ever, left Belfast for Germany but returned to Ireland in 1990, 10 years to the day from her husband’s funeral. She booked into a hotel in Bray, Co Wicklow and walked into the cold Irish Sea, suicide by drowning. The following year Renate, by then in South Africa, died from a combination of bulimia and chronic alcohol poisoning. And in 1994 Gabrielle, by then Mrs Robin Williams-Powell and mother of two daughters, committed suicide in Devon. Five years later her husband Robin, an RAF officer, followed her.  

 

One kidnap planned by a former Grundig employee, one murder, four suicides. Everything has its consequences.

 

A remarkable and very moving documentary on this tragic story is available on BBC iPlayer and told by Gabrielle’s daughters,Tanya and Rachel. Face Down: The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer

 

*****

      

I’ve written here before that I worry for my old friend Peter Hitchens. Does he really believe that MI5 is a leftie organisation as he said in his MoS column a fortnight ago? He also said he had stopped watching Joan starring the brilliant Sophie Turner because it was all about crime, specifically organised theft.

 

But almost all good drama on big and small screen, whether we like it or not, has crime in one form or another at its centre. One of the greatest film trilogies of all time is The Godfather and would we be better off without Morse or its prequel Endeavour? The Bible and much of Shakespeare are blood-soaked but somehow we have survived.

 

Peter, time for a lie-down.

ALAN FRAME

1 November 2024