Lina Heydrich was born Lina Mathilde von Osten on June 14, 1911, in Fehmarn, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Jürgen, was an impoverished German aristocrat of Danish origin who worked as a village school teacher. The family was strongly right-wing, and Lina became a convinced National Socialist and an ardent antisemite from a young age.
In 1930, at a rowing club ball in Kiel, she met Reinhard Heydrich, a naval lieutenant known for his ambition, arrogance, and passion for women. The two became romantically involved and announced their engagement less than two weeks later. Heydrich had broken a promise of marriage to another woman, the daughter of a senior naval officer, and a military court of honor found him guilty of dishonoring the officer corps.
He was compelled to resign his commission in April 1931.
The dismissal devastated Heydrich, who had no career prospects. Under Lina’s influence and that of her deeply nationalistic family, Heydrich, who had been indifferent to party politics, moved closer to National Socialism. Lina’s brother was a member of the Nazi SA, and Lina herself joined the Nazi Party in 1930 after attending a rally where Adolf Hitler spoke.
Reinhard Heydrich joined the Nazi Party and the SS in mid-1931.
At that time, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, was seeking to create an internal intelligence service for the party. Himmler agreed to interview Heydrich but canceled the appointment at the last minute. Lina, a fanatical Nazi, ignored the message, packed Heydrich’s suitcase, and sent him to Munich.
Himmler was immediately impressed with Heydrich, who had the blonde hair and blue eyes of the perfect Aryan. Heydrich was brought into the SS in August 1931, and in December of the same year, Lina and Reinhard married.
The marriage produced four children: two sons, Klaus and Heider, and two daughters, Silke and Marte. Heydrich rose quickly in the SS, developing the security service known as the SD. By January 1933, the SD had become the most significant intelligence agency within the Nazi Party.
After Hitler came to power in January 1933, Nazi leaders began persecuting German Jews. When Himmler was appointed commander of the Bavarian political police in April 1933, he named Heydrich his deputy. Lina triumphantly described the disempowerment of the Bavarian government and the waves of arrests in a letter to her parents.
She wrote about SA and SS men arresting political opponents and Jews, describing scenes of humiliation and violence with evident approval.
In June 1936, Himmler appointed Heydrich chief of the newly established Security Police main office, which combined the Gestapo and the criminal police. With Hitler’s backing, Himmler and Heydrich became two of the most powerful men in Germany’s internal administration. Lina did not get along with Himmler’s wife, Margarete, accusing her of stinginess.
Lina herself enjoyed the upscale lifestyle that her husband’s rising positions afforded them.
On the night of November 9–10, 1938, the Nazi SA, SS, Hitler Youth, and German civilians destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues, hospitals, and schools throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and areas of Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops. Ninety-one Jews were murdered. Reinhard Heydrich was one of the main organizers of the pogrom, which became known as Kristallnacht.
Lina actively stood by her husband and encouraged him to do even more for the Reich.
In 1939, Heydrich converted Salon Kitty, a high-class brothel in Berlin, into an espionage establishment with hidden cameras and microphones. Heydrich had a high sex drive and was a regular visitor to Berlin brothels, though all microphones had to be turned off during his inspection tours. Lina herself is said to have had several affairs, as Heydrich’s duties kept him away from home for long periods.
She later recalled, “I was married to Reinhard Heydrich for 10 years. He was not at home for seven of those years.”
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a previously dormant communist resistance movement in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia began acts of sabotage. Hitler dismissed the soft approach of the existing Reich Protector and appointed Heydrich as acting Reich Protector in September 1941.
For the Heydrich family, the appointment meant a rise in social standing. Until then, Heydrich had rarely negotiated directly with Hitler and had lived in Himmler’s shadow. As the first representative of the Protectorate, he negotiated directly with the Führer and stood at the top of the power hierarchy in Bohemia and Moravia.
Upon arriving in Prague, Heydrich told his staff, “We will Germanize the Czech vermin.”
Heydrich ordered a wave of terror targeting real and perceived leaders of opposition in the Czech lands. In October and November 1941, the Protectorate’s special court sentenced 342 people to death and turned 1,289 over to the Gestapo. His brutal policies quickly earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Prague.”
Heydrich also established the Theresienstadt ghetto, which existed from November 24, 1941, to May 9, 1945, serving mainly as a transit camp for Jews on route to extermination camps.
The family moved from Prague Castle to the luxurious Panenské Břežany Castle near Prague, which had been taken from its Jewish owner after the German invasion. The castle was redesigned to Lina’s satisfaction. She enjoyed a status her impoverished aristocratic parents could never have dreamed of.
At the time, Lina wrote, “I am a princess and I live in a fairy tale land.”
Heydrich was so confident that his pacification program had succeeded that he flagrantly disregarded security measures and traveled around Prague in an open vehicle. On May 27, 1942, Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš rolled a hand grenade under Heydrich’s transport vehicle, wounding the Nazi architect of the Holocaust. Heydrich was taken to a hospital, pale and screaming in pain.
Though not mortally wounded by the blast itself, grenade splinters in his leg and lower back led to an infection that killed the 38-year-old on June 4, 1942.
Because of her pregnancy, Lina did not attend the funeral. Their fourth child, a daughter named Marte, was born on July 23, 1942. Shortly after Heydrich’s death, in recognition of his service to the Nazi cause, especially in coordinating the Final Solution, the Nazi regime gave Lina the castle at Panenské Břežany.
She was also granted a large lifetime pension and an insurance policy, making her a wealthy woman.
Lina built a playground and a swimming pool at the castle. She destroyed the English park with its rare trees, sold the wood, and planted potatoes and other vegetables, which she then sold to German troops in Prague. To run her business, she needed workers.
She set up a miniature labor and concentration camp in the castle grounds, where around 150 prisoners from the Theresienstadt ghetto lived in former stables and worked for her under miserable conditions. They received little food, and witnesses said she physically abused them and treated her Jewish forced laborers badly. According to later testimonies, she observed the workers with binoculars and had SS guards whip those who worked too slowly.
She spat on or beat Jewish forced laborers when their behavior did not seem properly respectful.
It was not until February 1944 that prisoners from Theresienstadt stopped serving at the castle. Lina then extorted at least some compensation from Himmler. From Flossenbürg concentration camp, she got a group of 15 Jehovah’s Witnesses.
She repeatedly refused requests to pay properly for their labor. The matter went so far that Himmler himself began making payments on her behalf from his own account.
On October 24, 1943, Klaus, one of Heydrich’s four children, died in a traffic accident while cycling with his brother in the castle courtyard. Seeing the gate to the street open, Klaus rode out onto the road and was struck by a small truck. A Jewish doctor in the castle work group gave the boy first aid, but the injuries were fatal.
Lina decided to bury Klaus in the castle garden, and the grave was dug by Jewish prisoners. However, on the eve of the funeral, Lina decided that the final resting place for her Aryan child must not be dug by Jews. By morning, German soldiers had dug and decorated a new grave.
Lina then wanted the driver and all the passengers shot, but the investigation found the driver not guilty.
After the war, one eyewitness recalled seeing Lina standing with guests in front of the castle entrance and saying, “Das ist alles meiner,” meaning “That’s all mine.” But she was wrong.
The family lived in the castle until April 1945, when they fled the advancing Soviet Red Army. Before leaving, Lina had rabbits, geese, and chickens slaughtered and took jars of preserved meat with her. She shook hands with each of the castle staff and promised them a pension, believing she would return.
She never did.
In the second half of 1945, Lina arrived with her children in her native Fehmarn. In 1948, the Czechoslovak Extraordinary People’s Court sentenced her to life imprisonment in absentia. For two years, Lina had to hide from authorities for fear of extradition to Czechoslovakia.
The British authorities eventually refused the Czechoslovak government’s request to extradite her.
During the following decade, Lina had only a limited income. Her house in Fehmarn, which had been temporarily confiscated by the British after the war, was returned to her. She repeatedly applied for a general’s pension, even though Heydrich, as an SS general, was not a soldier according to German authorities but a war criminal.
Eventually, she was granted a widow’s pension in 1965.
That same year, she met Finnish theater director Manno Manninen, whom she married to change her last name. Lina then ran Reinhard Heydrich’s former summer house in Fehmarn as a restaurant. A significant part of its clientele were former supporters of the Nazi regime who reminisced about the old days.
The restaurant burned down in February 1969, and her husband died in September of the same year.
In 1976, Lina published a memoir titled “Life with a War Criminal.” She repeatedly recalled her time in the Protectorate with nostalgia. Even at the end of her life, she showed no remorse and refused to admit any guilt on her husband’s part for Nazi crimes.
About the atrocities in the Nazi camps, she said, “It was all a fairy tale.”
Lina Heydrich died in Fehmarn on August 14, 1985, at the age of 74. Six years before her death, she said, “National Socialism was a faith and I can never renounce this faith.”