Killing of Thomas Niedermayer

Just after Christmas in 1973, Thomas Niedermayer, manager of Grundig’s Northern Ireland factory, was bundled into a car outside his home in West Belfast. He was never seen alive again by his friends or family. Thomas and Ingeborg Niedermayer had survived the horrors of the Second World War to build a new life for their family in Northern Ireland, only to be caught up in a conflict with which they had no direct connection. His kidnapping was planned by one of his own employees, and was intended to secure the transfer of IRA prisoners, including Dolours and Marian Price, to jails in Northern Ireland. However, within three days Thomas Niedermayer was dead. It would be seven years before his body was found under an illegal rubbish tip close to his family home. The lives of those closest to him had been shattered and his wife and their two daughters would all take their own lives in the years after his murder. In the first comprehensive account of one of the darkest and mostly forgotten episodes of the Troubles, David Blake Knox unravels the complex web of personal and political circumstances that combined to destroy an entire innocent family.