“They told us it was a healing experience,” Blake Knox says. “Their parents told them almost nothing about the background. I sympathise and can fully understand how it was too painful to revisit that. But silence can be quite an imposition, as can talking about something. There is no hard and fast border. I think they learnt more about their family making this. It is my belief that it’s better to know more than know less.
“It was partly because it had gone wrong,” Blake Knox says. “It was also probably because there was an immediate reaction by both Protestants and Catholics. Bear in mind that the workplace in the factory he [Niedermayer] managed was largely Catholic.” “It struck me how gullible some journalists had been about the incident,” he says. “There was pretty consistent, deliberate disinformation by the IRA. That was followed by an awful lot of really quite reputable, experienced journalists who didn’t seem to ask themselves the question: have they anything to gain by telling me this version of events? Some of this was very hurtful and distressing to the family.
Niedermayer emerges as a gentle family man who took to life in Northern Ireland with quiet enthusiasm. Blake Knox takes some umbrage at the portrayal of him as some sort of tycoon. This was the era when European magnates were at risk of kidnapping by Marxist brigades. However, although he did act as honorary consul for West Germany, Niedermayer was not any sort of capitalist bigwig.
The later sections of Face Down – named, chillingly, for how Niedermayer was buried – have much to do with the late Brian Keenan . A sometime member of the IRA army council, Keenan, who had been a trade union representative at Grundig, is believed to have planned the kidnap.