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Gerry Gregg • Face Down: The Disappearance of Thomas Niedermayer

December 20, 2023
Gerry Gregg

Gerry Gregg’s powerful and moving documentary Face Down: The Disappearance of Thomas Niedermayer screens on RTE One this Wednesday December 20th at 9.35pm.

On 27th December 1973, a nightmare began for an entire family.  On that night, Thomas Niedermayer, Germany’s Honorary Consul to Northern Ireland and the Manager of the Grundig Factory in West Belfast, was kidnapped from his home in Belfast.  He was never seen alive again by his friends or family.  He became one of the ‘disappeared’, and it seemed that no-one knew what had happened to him.

His wife, Ingeborg, and his daughters Renate and Gabriele, spent the next seven years not knowing if Thomas were alive or dead.  Then, in 1980, an IRA defector provided the RUC with information that led to the recovery of Thomas’s body.  But the trauma for the Niedermayer’s did not end there.  In the years that followed the emotional toll would decimate the family.

Thomas and Ingeborg’s only granddaughters, Tanya and Rachel, were told nothing of this history when they were growing up.  Now, 50 years after their grandfather was kidnapped, they have embarked on a painful journey of discovery – to find out the shocking truth of what really happened half-a-century ago.

Director Gerry Gregg commented: “This is a story about how the ends can never justify the means and how in the case of the Niedermayer family and many others the legacy of violence is a crushing burden for the victims of terror.”

 

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