Face down

On 27 December 1973 the nightmare began: late that night German businessman Thomas Niedermayer was kidnapped from his home in Belfast. 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. In 1980, an IRA informant led police to recover his body. But the trauma for Thomas’s family was far from over: there were further devastating consequences for all of them.

Five decades on, FACE DOWN sets out to discover what really happened in Belfast all those years ago.

Now in its second, updated edition and the subject of a feature-length documentary, this astonishing story of one family’s generational trauma undermines any attempt to glamorise or minimise the effects of political violence.