Face Down E-Book

David Blake Knox

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer (2019):

‘David Blake Knox’s non-fiction work is a lie detector for the post-Troubles era … Niedermayer becomes, in Blake Knox’s clear yet deceptively subtle argument, a perfect test case.’

Ed O’Loughlin, The Irish Times

‘A rigorous and compelling historical study.’

Dublin Review of Books

‘This is no refresher course in Irish history. Blake Knox has the ability to write this non-fiction book like a novel.’

Irish Examiner

Praise for Face Down (2023 documentary):

‘Gripping, chilling, properly enraging … The film digs up some still-startling horrors, but it also restores fleshed-out humanity to a decent man.’

Donald Clarke, The Irish Times

‘David Blake Knox and Gerry Gregg’s fine documentary explores one of the Troubles’ most shameful episodes.’

Paul Whittington, Irish Independent

‘The dignity of Niedermayer’s granddaughters, their resilience and compassion, are deeply moving; the film skilfully shows how brutal acts rarely happen in a vacuum, but reverberate for many years.’

Leaf Arbuthnot, The Guardian

Also by David Blake Knox

The Curious History of Irish Dogs (2017)

Ireland and the Eurovision: The Winners, the Losers and the Turkey (2015)

Hitler’s Irish Slaves (2012, 2017)

FACE DOWN: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THOMAS NIEDERMAYER

Second edition published in 2023 by New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

First edition published under the title The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer in 2019

Copyright © David Blake Knox, 2019, 2023

The right of David Blake Knox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-847-0

Epub ISBN: 978-1-84840-735-0

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Edited by Kerri Ward

Index by Jane Rogers

Typeset by JVR Creative India

Cover design by Spinnaker

Cover photos courtesy of Blueprint Pictures (top) and Belfast News Letter (bottom)

Printed by L&C, Poland, lcprinting.eu

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

Set in Calluna in 11.5 pt on 17 pt

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Georgie Bennett and Edie Blake Knox

Contents

 Abbreviations

 Introduction

1.     The Body in the Glen

2.     The Victim

3.     An Army of Rapists

4.     Fear and Loathing

5.     The Miracle-Worker

6.     The Apprentice

7.     The Shape of Things to Come

8.     The Storm Breaks

9.     Yesterday’s Man

10.   The Honorary Consul

11.   Neighbours with Guns

12.   The Split

13.   Legitimate Targets

14.   No Half-Measures

15.   The Wrong Thing

16.   Dead Man Walking

17.   Blood on the Streets

18.   The English Campaign

19.   Happy about Dying

20.   Kidnappers Always Ring Twice

21.   The Edge of the World

22.   The Awful Reality

23.   Fake News

24.   Breakthrough

25.   A Force Like No Other

26.   We All Feel the Shame

27.   How He Died

28.   The Stuff of Martyrs

29.   Asking to be Killed

30.   Ballot Boxes and Armalites

31.   The Price of Peace

32.   The Prerogative of Mercy

33.   Legacies

34.   The Deep Dark Wood

35.   Collateral Damage

36.   It Ends Here

 Bibliography

 Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation

CID

The Criminal Investigation Department of the RUC

CPGB

The Communist Party of Great Britain

DFA

The Department of Foreign Affairs (Ireland)

EEC

The European Economic Community

ETA

Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: an armed Basque separatist organisation

EU

The European Union

FARC

Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia: a guerrilla organisation in Colombia

FBI

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (USA)

FLQ

Front de libération du Québec: a paramilitary separatist group in Québec

GOC

General Officer Commanding the British army (Northern Ireland)

INLA

The Irish National Liberation Army: a republican paramilitary group

IRA

The Irish Republican Army: a republican paramilitary group, also known as the Provisional IRA

NICRA

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association

NIO

The Northern Ireland Office

ODCs

‘Ordinary Decent Criminals’ who were not part of any paramilitary group

PSNI

The Police Service of Northern Ireland

PTSD

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

RPG

Rocket Propelled Grenades

RTÉ

Raidió Teilifís Éireann: Ireland’s national broadcaster

RUC

The Royal Ulster Constabulary

SB

The RUC Special Branch

SDLP

The Social Democratic and Labour Party

UDA

The Ulster Defence Association: a loyalist paramilitary organisation

UDR

The Ulster Defence Regiment: a locally recruited part of the British army

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation

UVF

The Ulster Volunteer Force: a loyalist paramilitary organisation

Introduction

There is an inherent and understandable tension between the desire, on one hand, to move on from the political turbulence that convulsed Northern Ireland across four decades and the need, on the other hand, to confront and understand the causes of the personal and communal traumas experienced by both of its major communities.

I can relate to both compulsions. During much of the 1980s, I worked as a television producer for Ireland’s national broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), covering the ‘Troubles’ – a term which understates the years of violence that ended, scarred or ruined many thousands of lives. It was often a grim assignment. Between 1966 and 2006, close to 3,700 people died in the Troubles. Almost every day of the year marks the death of someone killed in this conflict, and it has been estimated that almost 50,000 individuals were also maimed or injured. In total, it has been reckoned that around 500,000 people have been directly affected by acts of political violence. Given that the population of Northern Ireland is less than 2 million, these are remarkable (and shocking) statistics.

There is a phenomenon known in Northern Ireland (and elsewhere) as ‘whataboutery’. This usually occurs when a particular atrocity perpetrated by members of one community in the conflict is mentioned and the immediate response is to ask ‘what about’ some equal (or worse) atrocity committed by the ‘other’ side – and there is always an ‘other’ side in Northern Ireland. It seems inevitable that, when one community assigns particular meanings to events in the past, it will antagonise the community that interprets the same historical events in a radically different way. In this context, language can become weaponised and even the choice of individual words may be seized upon as evidence of some underlying bias.

I do not accept George Santayana’s famous claim that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. That maxim strikes me as demonstrably untrue: both major communities in Northern Ireland regularly invoke ‘memories’ of events that occurred hundreds of years ago. That does not serve to inoculate them against the iniquities of the past. Indeed, such memories are sometimes called upon to justify their current prejudices and recurring acts of violence. There are, in any case, very few (if any) occasions when historical events can simply be said to have ‘repeated’ themselves.

In that context, I am inclined to sympathise with the views of the American writer David Rieff, who has argued that it is sometimes better to choose to forget traumatic and divisive incidents in any country’s past. Rieff has identified Ireland as a country that is particularly slow to let go of its historic grievances. He believes that Irish history provides an ‘illuminating case study of the uses and misuses of the past in the construction, reconstruction, amendment and transformation of the collective memory’.

That is certainly true of Northern Ireland where the recitation of historical wrongs can often be self-serving and lead to toxic political effects. As Edna Longley has observed, the past ‘as a continuum’ often looms larger in Northern Ireland than the past ‘as mortality’. For David Rieff, remembering historic events is not so much a moral imperative as a moral option. I agree with him that there may be some occasions when it is better to let the dead bury the dead, but I also believe there are occasions when that temptation should be resisted. Indeed, there is sometimes a compelling need to interrogate the past and question its accepted narratives.

In 2013, I was contacted by my former colleague Ann Marie Hourihane. I knew Ann Marie as an author and journalist. She referred me to A Knock on the Door, a recent radio documentary on RTÉ, and subsequently sent me an article she had written about it. The documentary and her article both related to the kidnapping of a businessman called Thomas Niedermayer. That name stirred a distant memory: I could dimly recall something about a German businessman who had been kidnapped and murdered by the IRA in the early 1970s.

When I listened to the documentary on the RTÉ Player, more memories were revived. It was presented by Joe Duffy, one of Ireland’s leading broadcasters and someone who has shone a much-needed light on neglected aspects of Ireland’s social and political history. The radio documentary was produced by Ciaran Cassidy and it revealed some of the terrible collateral damage that Thomas Niedermayer’s abduction and death inflicted on his family.

It was, in many respects, a very dark story, but it was greatly to the credit of Duffy and Cassidy that their programme was made. Ann Marie proposed that we should try to make a film documentary about this case and, over the following months, we explored the background to the story. (I should add that any faults or errors contained in this book are entirely my responsibility.) Ann Marie forwarded to me some very valuable documentation that she had obtained in the German Foreign Office’s Political Archive. The film she had proposed was never made, but the story of the Niedermayers had snagged in my mind and I was drawn back to it in subsequent years. Eventually, I was able to make a feature documentary film about this case with Gerry Gregg – my friend and former colleague – and Kelda Crawford-McCann from Strident Media in Belfast. This became – thanks to Colm O’Callaghan, its first commissioning editor – a co-production between RTÉ, ARTE (the French-German channel), BBC Northern Ireland and Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland.

In the course of making that film, I learned a good deal more about Thomas Niedermayer, as well as the impact his abduction had, not just on his wife and children, but also on his granddaughters, Tanya Williams-Powell and Rachel Williams-Powell. Speaking with them, it was clear that the events that took place in Ireland many years before have continued to impact on their lives. It must have been difficult at times for them to re-visit painful memories but they brought a crucial perspective both to this book and to our film. They also brought a sense of hope for the future in their determination that the devastating legacy of their grandfather’s abduction and killing would not be passed on to the next generation.

In a sense, this is the story of two men: Thomas Niedermayer and Brian Keenan. They came from somewhat similar social backgrounds and they both trained to be electronic engineers. They also shared some personal characteristics: they were both intelligent, energetic and single-minded in the pursuit of their respective goals. The two men knew each other and once worked for the same company, but they were not friends and their paths in life were very different. One of them became actively involved in the political violence that enveloped Northern Ireland during the years of the Troubles, while the other became his innocent victim.

But this is also a story about women. One of those women is Ingeborg Niedermayer. Like her husband, she managed to survive the horrors of the Second World War, but both were deeply affected by the traumatic experiences they had undergone. Ingeborg would suffer further anguish when Thomas was abducted, and then throughout the long years of uncertainty that followed his disappearance. Her two daughters, Renate and Gabriele, also underwent great suffering, and all three women were later to end their lives in desperate circumstances.

In that context, it seems deeply unjust that the only one of those who were centrally involved in this story and who died of natural causes was Brian Keenan – the IRA leader who organised the abduction of Thomas Niedermayer and who ordered the subsequent concealment of his body.

This book is primarily about the victims of political violence. Some of those victims suffered physically – others, psychologically or emotionally. Neither Catholics nor Protestants, unionists nor nationalists, are without blame for the violence in Northern Ireland. But that does not mean that everyone is equally accountable for each violent incident. In the case of Thomas Niedermayer, the guilt lies overwhelmingly – indeed, exclusively – in one direction. An innocent man was abducted solely in order that his kidnappers could use his life as a bargaining chip to advance a political cause with which he had no connection. Their brutal incompetence led to his death and their cynical denial of responsibility for his disappearance added to the terrible distress experienced by his family.

Those who abducted and killed Thomas Niedermayer might have considered themselves to be soldiers in an underground army, but, even when judged by military criteria, their actions were criminal, cowardly and callous. In the catalogue of heartache, misery and loss caused by the Troubles, the story of the Niedermayers is particularly poignant. The killing of Thomas Niedermayer may have been pointless, but it was not without meaning. In this book, I have tried to untangle the complex web of circumstances that combined to ensnare and destroy Niedermayer and his immediate family.

The traumatic legacy of what occurred in 1973 has been felt – and continues to be felt – in different countries and continents and across successive generations. Ballads are sung, parades are staged, murals are painted and monuments are erected to honour some of those who terrorised innocent civilians during the Troubles. There are few ballads, parades, murals or monuments to remind us of those who suffered grievously as a result of that terror. I hope this book contributes – in however small a way – to some redress of that shameful neglect.

1.The Body in the Glen

It took them four weeks to find his corpse.

A small group of workmen from the ‘West Belfast Environmental Action Group’ spent a month clearing thousands of tons of stinking rubbish that had been dumped illegally in Colin Glen, an area of public parkland. Apart from the dreadful stench of rotting material, the site was infested with rats and other vermin.

The workmen’s objective was apparently to restore the Glen to its former natural beauty. In reality, they were all undercover RUC officers and they kept Walther PPK automatic handguns hidden under their waterproof jackets.

Colin Glen is located close to what was an IRA stronghold in Andersonstown and the policemen’s lives would have been in grave danger if their true identities had been discovered. The RUC officers were searching for the body of someone they believed had been murdered by the IRA. They were on the verge of abandoning their mission when one of them discovered some muddy grey trousers. The RUC had been led to Colin Glen by a well-placed source inside the IRA. Now, they realised that the information that he had provided was accurate.

There were human leg bones inside the trousers. Some slippers were found nearby. A few minutes later, they dug up a skull. The hands of the body they excavated had been tied behind the victim’s back. He had been gagged and his feet had been bound together by a pair of women’s tights. His body had been buried in a shallow grave, face down. In the chilling words of one of his killers, that was so he could ‘dig himself deeper’.

2.The Victim

The body had a name, a history and a life: Thomas Niedermayer was a German businessman. He and his family had been living in Northern Ireland since 1961, but he was born in 1928 in Bamberg, a small Bavarian town on the River Regnitz in Upper Franconia in south-western Germany. A large part of this medieval town is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but Bamberg also has a darker side to its more recent history.

The town was the location of an important conference convened by Adolf Hitler in 1926. He had become concerned that the Nazi Party was about to split into two regional factions. One of these consisted of Gauleiters (District Leaders) from northern Germany, who were generally regarded as more urban, more radical and more sympathetic to socialist ideas. The others were Gauleiters who came from more conservative rural areas in southern Germany and who were less interested in abstract theory than in nationalist and racist ideology.

Hitler wanted the issue to be resolved as clearly as possible and the fact that he chose to hold this conference in a small southern town like Bamberg indicated where his own preferences lay. The Bamberg Conference proved decisive in determining the future development of the Nazi Party and in establishing the dominance of its conservative faction. However, in some respects, the final act of the conference in Bamberg did not take place until eight years later. That was during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ when scores of members of the Nazis’ radical faction were murdered by the SS on Hitler’s orders.

Thomas Niedermayer was born two years after the Bamberg Conference and he was 4 years old in 1933 when Hitler and the Nazi Party took control of the German state. Like other fascistic or extreme populist parties, the Nazis claimed to represent a movement of youth – and ‘fresh blood’ – that was somehow destined to supplant the older generations and correct their grievous mistakes. In that context, Hitler believed that the indoctrination of children – and male children, in particular – with Nazi ideology was essential for the future of his ‘thousand-year Reich’. He wanted to produce boys that were ‘as tough as leather and solid as steel’. The Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth) programme was designed to create future generations of such loyal and dedicated Nazis. It was established in 1925 and by 1930 had enrolled almost 25,000 members. When Hitler came to power in 1933, all other youth organisations in Germany were compelled to disband and become part of the Hitler-Jugend. By the end of 1933, its membership had reached almost 2 million.

As the 1930s progressed and Nazi control of Germany tightened, it became increasingly difficult for children to avoid membership of the Nazis’ youth movement. By the end of the decade, there were almost 8 million members of the Hitler-Jugend. When Thomas Niedermayer was 7 years old, the Reichstag had passed the Gesetz über die Hitler-Jugend: a law which made it mandatory for all male German children who were aged 14, free of physical or mental disabilities and of proven ‘Aryan’ descent to become members of the Nazi Youth organisation. Thomas turned 14 in 1942.

In some respects, Thomas Niedermayer was fortunate in his date of birth. In the closing years of the Second World War, large numbers of boys in the Hitler-Jugend were drafted and trained to fight as infantry troops in support of the regular army. Wehrertüchtigungslager (Defence Strengthening Camps) were set up throughout Germany and boys were taught how to use modern weaponry. In the final stages of the war, the Nazis even recruited an entire SS Panzer Tank Division from the Hitler-Jugend. These child-soldiers proved ready to die for their Führer and the 12th Panzer Division suffered 60 per cent casualties following the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944.

In 1942, however, members of the Nazi youth movement had not yet been assigned to military service. Instead, they were sent to work in war-related industries. So many men had been drafted into the Wehrmacht (the German Army) that there was a chronic shortage of labour in Germany. This shortfall had been met, in part, by the introduction of German women into occupations previously reserved for men, and the use of vast numbers of slave labourers from countries invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. However, even that was not enough to feed the ravenous appetite of the German war machine, and young boys who were members of the Hitler-Jugend were also recruited. Some, like Thomas, were specifically assigned to work for the Luftwaffe (the German air force). He concluded his formal education in school at the age of 14 and was sent to be trained as an aircraft mechanic in Friedrichshafen where the Zeppelin and Dornier plane factories were based. From there, he was taken to work in a Luftwaffe plant in Karlsruhe on the French-German border.

This assignment may have helped to ensure that Thomas Niedermayer survived the war, but it does not mean that he escaped unscathed. In the 1930s, the Nazis had established Karlsruhe as an important training base for Luftwaffe pilots and so it was an obvious location for aircraft factories. During the early years of the war, Karlsruhe had managed to escape relatively undamaged in comparison with some other German towns and cities. Air raids did take place, but they were infrequent and spread over a period of time. This allowed Karlsruhe’s inhabitants to prepare effective forms of defence such as the construction of underground civilian shelters and the digging of large water pits to assist firefighting. Reproductions of Karlsruhe’s aircraft factories were built in nearby forests, and these were bombed repeatedly by the RAF before advances in radar technology revealed them to be fakes.

By 1942, however, the Allies had identified the factories where Thomas worked as being of strategic importance to the Luftwaffe, and RAF Bomber Command had listed Karlsruhe as one of the top 25 German cities that they wanted to destroy. The Allies’ stated objective was not only to attack the city’s aircraft factories, but also ‘to break the morale of the civilian population’. In the middle of 1943 – soon after Thomas Niedermayer had arrived in Karlsruhe – Allied bombing raids on the city began to increase in number, in efficiency and in ferocity. In the early morning of 27 September 1944, the RAF launched a major raid on the city. A formation of 248 bombers dropped over 200,000 incendiary devices as well as hundreds of tons of high explosives. A tsunami of fire swept through Karlsruhe’s eastern districts. However, the cold, wet weather and the determined efforts of the city’s fire fighters managed to limit the damage. Ironically, this meant that Air Marshal Arthur Harris, of RAF Bomber Command, ordered further massive assaults on Karlsruhe in order to ensure its complete destruction. On 4 December 1944, the city was attacked by 513 RAF planes, which carpet-bombed the city – dropping huge numbers of heavy aerial mines, explosive bombs and incendiary devices. There were more massive air raids later that month – one involving almost 1,000 planes – and large tracts of the city centre were completely obliterated. In the closing years of the war, everyone in Karlsruhe lived under constant threat of sudden death. By the beginning of 1945, hundreds of the city’s inhabitants had been killed in the bombings as well as hundreds of slave workers. Less than 4,000 family homes – out of 17,000 – were left standing.

By all accounts, the final months of the Second World War generated widespread fear and panic among the city’s inhabitants. According to witnesses, the cacophony of roaring aircraft engines, howling sirens, exploding bombs and defensive gunfire was incessant and terrifying. Much of Karlsruhe’s population spent the final weeks of the war hiding in dark and dank underground shelters. They could hear French tanks and infantry troops advancing closer to their city. It seemed that nowhere was safe: even carts in the fields and individuals walking home were strafed by low-flying Allied planes.

In the last weeks of the war, German military engineers blew up a number of bridges to prevent Allied troops crossing the Rhine and the road entrances to Karlsruhe were also barricaded. But, on the morning of 4 April 1945, after a heavy artillery bombardment, French forces began to enter the city. It seems that the only armed resistance that the French encountered in Karlsruhe came from some small units of the Hitler-Jugend. These were subdued within a matter of hours and the French had taken complete control of the town by eleven o’clock of that spring morning.

All males in the city who were between the ages of 16 and 45 were required to report to the French military authorities to be examined and questioned. Around 300 adult men were sent to an internment camp in nearby Offenburg, but 700 or so were held as prisoners in Karlsruhe. These prisoners included many former members of the Nazis’ youth movement, one of whom was Thomas Niedermayer. The Allies’ plan was to re-educate these young people and try to counteract their years of indoctrination by the Nazis. This usually involved compelling them to watch graphic footage of the atrocities that had taken place in camps such as Belsen and Treblinka.

As part of this re-education, in Bavaria, former members of the Hitler-Jugend were taken to visit the concentration camp at Dachau, where many thousands had died as a result of starvation, neglect, brutality and illness – as well as in hideous medical experiments when prisoners were frozen alive and subjected to violent decompression. Soon after the war ended, part of the camp at Dachau was used to house ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe. Many of these came from what had formerly been known as East Prussia: one of them was a young woman who would play a key role in Thomas’s life. Her name was Ingeborg Tranowski.

Thomas Niedermayer remained in an American internment camp for around six months. By the time he emerged he was still only 16 years old and had spent some of his formative years in a war zone. Judith Lewis Herman, a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, described to me that environment as ‘a zone of prolonged and repeated trauma where one is under a death threat pretty much all of the time and escape is pretty much impossible’. Some of the boys from the Hitler-Jugend who had lived through the collapse of Nazi Germany regarded their ability to survive as a source of pride in itself. They had, after all, been members of an organisation whose motto was taken from Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker’ (‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’). Indeed, the determination of German men and women to escape from the collective trauma of the Second World War was evident in Konrad Adenauer’s inaugural speech as Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany in the first session of the Bundestag (the German parliament). He urged his fellow countrymen to ‘put the past behind us’ and move forward with a renewed sense of purpose. For understandable reasons, Thomas Niedermayer and many young Germans like him did not wish to dwell on the horrors they had recently witnessed. It seems that one of the ways they repressed the traumatic experiences of their youth was to embrace the material opportunities that were available in Germany in the post-war years.

In the aftermath of the war, some of the young survivors applied themselves to advancing their careers with an impressive level of commitment. And many of those young Germans found that an unprecedented range of personal opportunities had opened up for them. These opportunities arose, in part, because of the post-war boom in the German economy and also because of the Western Allies’ commitment to establish the West German state as a bulwark against the expansion of Soviet Russia. But it was chiefly due to the colossal number of young German men who had been killed in the world war. Close to 3 million had died and that left innumerable vacancies in the professions, in commerce and in industry that needed to be filled. Thomas Niedermayer was one of those who benefited from these opportunities.

After his release, and like many of his contemporaries, Niedermayer did not return to school. Instead, he went back to Bamberg where he trained as a toolmaker. By 1947, when he was just 18, Niedermayer had already become a foreman in a local factory. At the time of his abduction, there may have been an impression in Ireland that Niedermayer was some sort of fat-cat capitalist who came from a privileged social background. He was described in some Irish newspapers as a ‘German industrialist’ and even as a ‘tycoon’. In reality, Thomas came from a modest working-class family – his father was a car mechanic – and he was conscripted into an adult occupation when he was still a child. While in Northern Ireland, he worked as the general manager of a factory that was moderately sized by German standards and he did not own shares or exert boardroom authority in that or any other company.

In 1953, Niedermayer moved back to Karlsruhe to work as an assistant to the Company Director in an electronics plant. This was his first step on the managerial ladder. By then, he had already met and married Ingeborg Tranowski, the young refugee from East Prussia who had been housed at Dachau. Thomas and Ingeborg both had direct experience of the horrific effects of violence while they were still very young, but it seems highly unlikely that either of them could ever have imagined that the small-scale nature of the Troubles in Northern Ireland would prove as lethal as the global conflict they had both survived.

3.An Army of Rapists

Ingeborg Tranowski became one of the Heimatvertriebene – the 12–16 million ‘displaced’ Germans who fled or were expelled from the territories that had been annexed by Poland, Lithuania and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War. This was the largest forced migration in European history, and it had far-reaching consequences for the whole of German society as well as for the individuals involved. Ingeborg grew up at the opposite end of Germany to Thomas Niedermayer, and it seems doubtful that they would ever have met – let alone married – if it were not for the catastrophic effects of what Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, had enthusiastically described as ‘total war’.

Ingeborg was born in 1927 – the year before Thomas. Like her husband, she had spent some of her formative years caught up in the brutality and trauma of a world war. She was one of nine children and grew up in a small village called Hohenweise in the far north of what was then known as East Prussia. By the end of the First World War, the Western Allies were determined that Prussia would never again be strong enough to pose a military threat to the rest of Europe. As a result, most of the major territorial losses that were imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles involved the dismemberment of what had once been the Prussian state. Some parts of Prussia were ceded to Belgium; other parts to Lithuania, to Denmark, to Czechoslovakia and to Poland.

This loss of German territory became a major source of grievance during the years of the Weimar Republic and a focus for Hitler’s condemnation of the ‘November Criminals’ who had signed the Versailles Treaty. Under that Treaty, the principal Prussian port of Danzig was designated an open or ‘free’ city to be administered by the League of Nations, while the eastern region of Prussia became an isolated enclave that could only reach the rest of Germany by ship or by the railway line that led through the ‘Polish Corridor’ to the remainder of the German state.

In 1939, East Prussia was mainly an agricultural region that held around two-and-a-half million inhabitants, most of whom were ethnic Germans. Ingeborg Tranowski was one of them but, as her name (which is of Polish origin) suggests, different ethnicities had co-existed and mingled for centuries in this part of Europe. In 1938, the Nazis had tried to erase that diverse history by ‘Germanising’ thousands of individual surnames and renaming hundreds of villages and towns. When Hitler came to power, there were also around 10,000 Jews living in East Prussia; when the war ended, there were none.

The British and French governments had agreed to Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1938. They accepted Hitler’s assurance that this would be ‘the last of Germany’s territorial claims in Europe’. However, shortly after that agreement had been signed in Munich, the Nazis stepped up their demands for the inclusion of Danzig and the Polish Corridor in the new German Reich. Nazi newspapers whipped up nationalist sentiment, claiming that ethnic Germans needed immediate protection from brutal Polish repression. Hitler proposed building a new motorway through the Polish Corridor which would be under German control. This would have reconnected East Prussia to the rest of Germany while, at the same time, denying Poland direct access to the sea and its vital trade routes.

For understandable reasons, the Polish government declined to give way to the German demands. The Nazis’ response was to stage a ‘false flag’ attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz, a small Prussian town that was close to the border with Poland. On 31 August 1939, a group of SS men dressed in Polish army uniforms acted as agents provocateurs. They seized the radio station in Gleiwitz and proceeded to broadcast political messages that purported to come from Polish nationalists. The day after the alleged ‘incursion’ had taken place, Hitler sent German troops into Poland and it was this act that finally triggered the world war.

East Prussia escaped with relatively little damage in the opening years of hostilities. There were few urban centres and the region was not a major centre of armaments production and was, therefore, not an obvious target for Allied air raids. However, almost all of the young men in East Prussia were soon drafted into the Wehrmacht. Their roles in agriculture and industry were taken by slave workers from countries occupied by Nazi Germany and by thousands of young German women like Ingeborg Tranowski. In 1939 it had become mandatory for all German girls aged between 14 and 18 to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Maidens) – the girls’ section of the Hitler-Jugend – and Ingeborg was 14 years old in 1941. The Bund’s original purpose was to prepare German girls for their future role as mothers of the Third Reich. However, as the war progressed, its members were called upon to function as a type of reserve labour force. Indeed, it was the recruitment of young German women – as well as foreign slave workers – that enabled the Nazis to sustain and prolong the war despite a series of crushing military defeats.

At the age of 16, Ingeborg began her training as a nurse but this was interrupted the following year due to serious illness in her family. She would not resume working as a nurse for many years. When she did, she was living in Northern Ireland and had returned to nursing as a means of distraction in the wake of her husband’s disappearance.

The relative peace that East Prussia had enjoyed was shattered in the summer of 1944. In August of that year, Königsberg, the medieval city where Immanuel Kant was born, was almost obliterated by successive RAF bombing raids. By that time, the Red Army was driving the Wehrmacht out of Eastern Europe and the roads into East Prussia had already become crowded with ethnic German refugees fleeing before the Soviet advance.

There was still time for the German authorities to arrange an orderly mass evacuation of civilians before the Red Army arrived, but the local Gauleiter, Erich Koch, was an ardent Nazi who regarded such a measure as an admission of defeat. The civilian population of East Prussia would pay a high price for Koch’s refusal to countenance their departure. It was, however, a price that Koch did not have to pay himself; he managed to arrange his own escape from East Prussia and died of natural causes almost forty years later.

The refugees from eastern Europe who arrived in East Prussia in 1944 brought with them stories of the dreadful savagery of the Soviet invaders, and Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment (sic) and Propaganda was keen to amplify the fears that such stories generated. The Nazi press and newsreels accused Soviet soldiers of heinous war crimes which included the mass murder of German children and the rape of German women ‘from 8 to 84’. Goebbels even arranged for observers from neutral Switzerland to visit one of the villages – close to Ingeborg’s home – where multiple rapes and murders by Soviet troops had taken place for them to witness the carnage. ‘For once’, as Antony Beevor observed, Goebbels’s horror propaganda ‘turned out to be no exaggeration’. There is no doubt that terrible atrocities were committed by the Red Army. What is also clear is the terror that reports of these atrocities induced in the population of East Prussia.

By then, the entire population of Germany had been systematically misled for years by their leaders about the real state of the war. When, on 13 January 1945, Soviet forces launched their first major offensive into the Reich, the speed at which the Eastern front collapsed was entirely unexpected and deeply shocking to the German citizens of East Prussia. January 1945 was also one of the coldest winters ever recorded in north-eastern Europe. The earth was frozen solid and night temperatures fell 25 degrees below zero. This meant that the ground could not easily be dug up to create defensive positions for the German troops. It also meant that rivers were frozen and did not form serious obstacles for any assault force. In other words, conditions were ideal for a Soviet invasion of East Prussia. Within a week, Soviet forces had severed most road and railway links, leaving the region cut off from the rest of Germany.

In that bitter weather, tens of thousands of Prussian civilians packed their possessions onto sledges and horse-drawn carts and fled in confusion from the rapid advance of the Red Army. No one seemed to know for certain where the Russian troops were, or from which direction they would come. Huge caravans of half-starved and panic-stricken people who were desperate to leave East Prussia clogged the roads. Many had left with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Parents searched in despair for lost children and semi-feral hordes of children wandered through forests and abandoned farmsteads looking for their families.

One German officer described this grim exodus: these were, he wrote, ‘columns of misery: the children, the women, the sick and the old, the wounded and the ever more wounded, and all with their helpless, pleading eyes’. Another German soldier saw one young woman on her own, riding a horse as far and as quickly away from the Red Army as its hooves could carry her. The young woman’s ancestors, he imagined, had probably arrived in East Prussia many generations ago. Now, he believed, he was watching ‘six hundred years of history’ disappear before his eyes.

In the first four months of 1945, many thousands of refugees died while trying to flee the Soviet army. They starved, froze to death, drowned at sea, succumbed to epidemics, exhaustion and injuries, or were killed by the Russians. But some Prussians died by their own hands. Nazi propaganda had glorified Selbstmord – ‘self-murder’ – as preferable to defeat, and, between January and May of 1945, large numbers of German civilians took their own lives. The first of these mass suicides took place in East Prussia, but, eventually, they spread like an epidemic through other regions of Germany on a scale that was unprecedented in European history. German men tended to hang or shoot themselves, while one of the most common methods used by German women to kill themselves – and often their children as well – was suicide by drowning.

It could, of course, be argued that the Third Reich was a regime that carried from the start the seeds of its self-destruction. The German armies that invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 had waged war with exceptional ruthlessness and indiscriminate brutality. Now, it seemed the time of retribution was at hand. Soviet forces advanced into East Prussia in immense columns – according to Stalin, ‘quantity has its own quality’ - and many of the Russian troops believed that there was no such thing as an innocent German. Natalya Gesse was a Russian journalist who observed the Soviet soldiers in action during their invasion of East Prussia. She described them as ‘an army of rapists’.

The future Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served as a Soviet artillery officer during the invasion of East Prussia. He wrote later that it was commonplace for any German women that Russian soldiers encountered ‘to be raped and then shot’. (Solzhenitsyn was arrested and imprisoned in a gulag for criticising such actions in a letter sent from the front.)

At least 2 million women are thought to have been sexually assaulted by Soviet soldiers during the Red Army’s invasion of Germany, and a substantial minority, if not an actual majority, appear to have suffered multiple rapes. One tank commander even boasted that, when the Red Army finally left Germany, it had left ‘two million of our children’ in its wake. However, given the immense misery that Nazi Germany had inflicted on the world, there was little sympathy for the suffering of these women. The use of rape as a weapon to terrorise women and subdue a civilian population seems to have been regarded with a high degree of tolerance – and sometimes active encouragement – by the commanders of the Red Army.

Much of the German population of East Prussia – which by 1945 was largely composed of women, children and old men – managed somehow to escape the Red Army. Ingeborg was one of those who fled in terror before its advance. In normal circumstances, it would have taken a matter of hours to travel by train from Königsberg in East Prussia to Berlin. But by January of 1945 many railway tracks had been destroyed by Allied bombs, and the trains that were still running attracted huge crowds that were desperate to board them. It took Ingeborg almost six months to make her way through the mayhem and chaos of this mass exodus and find safety in a zone of Germany that was occupied by Allied forces.

There was a chronic lack of accommodation in north-western Germany for refugees from the east. Allied bombing raids had concentrated for years on its urban and industrial centres, and that had resulted in the complete destruction of great swathes of housing in those towns and cities. In the aftermath of the war, there were millions of ethnic German refugees that needed to be housed, and that created a huge logistical problem for the Western Allies.

Their solution was to send these immigrants to rural areas, where there were smaller populations, less war damage and more available housing. Bavaria was one of the principal locations where immigrants were sent, and by 1950 almost a quarter of its total population consisted of ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Prussia. The Germans who arrived in Bavaria in 1945, as Ingeborg did, were not welcomed by many of Bavaria’s local inhabitants. The immigrants were often mocked for their regional accents and customs – some could not even speak German.

That reaction was, perhaps, understandable. According to Jürgen Müller-Hohagen of the Dachau Institute, ‘the awareness of the horrors (the immigrants) had experienced was very, very low.’ One writer noted that the farmers in Bavaria had ‘never been stuck in air-raid shelters when the bombs rained down and the lives of their loved ones were extinguished’, and had ‘never trekked, shivering and hungry, along foreign country roads’. For such people, he believed, it was as if the dreadful ordeals of the East Prussians had never happened, or, at least, ‘had nothing to do with them’.