On March 15, 1939, German troops marched into Prague. Crowds stood in stunned silence as armored vehicles rolled across the cobblestones and soldiers took positions at bridges, ministries, and railway stations.
By afternoon, the swastika flew above the city. The capital of Czechoslovakia had fallen without a single battle, and fear settled over the city as arrests began.
In the days that followed, Prague Castle and the confiscated estates around the city became seats of a new power that ruled through executions, mass arrests, and calculated terror. One of the most ruthless men of the regime would soon take control of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, earning the name Butcher of Prague.
Beside him stood a woman who shared his beliefs, embraced the privileges of conquest, and settled into a castle taken from its Jewish owner. Her name was Lina Heydrich.
Lina Mathilde von Osten was born on June 14, 1911, on the island of Fehmarn in the Baltic Sea, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Jürgen von Osten, was an impoverished aristocrat who worked as a village school teacher, while her mother, Mathilde, came from a business family and managed the household.
Lina grew up shaped by German defeat in the First World War, resentment against the Weimar Republic, and hostility toward Jews and the political left. She absorbed these ideas early and became a passionate anti-Semite while still a teenager.
After graduating from school in Oldenburg in 1927, she began training as a trade teacher in Kiel in 1928. Her life changed on December 6, 1930, at a rowing club ball in Kiel, where she met a naval officer named Reinhard Heydrich.
Heydrich was ambitious, intelligent, and socially confident. Within less than two weeks, on December 18, 1930, they announced their engagement.
At the time, Heydrich had already promised marriage to another woman, the daughter of a senior naval officer, but he broke that promise to be with Lina. The decision caused a scandal, and in April 1931 a military court of honor forced Heydrich to resign from the German Navy for dishonoring the officer corps.
The dismissal devastated Heydrich, whose career appeared ruined. Lina reacted differently, seeing opportunity in the crisis. She already supported the Nazi Party and encouraged him to join the party and its elite paramilitary formation, the SS.
In June and July 1931, Reinhard Heydrich joined the Nazi Party and the SS. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was searching for capable men to build an internal intelligence service, and Heydrich was introduced to him in August 1931.
The recommendation was based on the wrong assessment that Heydrich had intelligence experience from his time in the Navy. Himmler was impressed and hired him.
On December 26, 1931, Heydrich married Lina. In the following years they had four children together: Klaus, Heider, Silke, and Marte.
Heydrich quickly proved his ability to Himmler by creating and expanding the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the intelligence organ of the Nazi Party. By January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, the SD was already a powerful tool of repression.
Lina followed her husband's rise with pride. In letters to her parents, she described the arrests of political opponents and Jews with enthusiasm and portrayed violence by the SA and SS as justified revenge.
After Hitler consolidated power in 1933, repression intensified and Heydrich became an important player in the Nazi movement. In 1936, he was put in charge of the Sipo, the Security Police, which united the Gestapo and the criminal police into one centralized structure.
This made Heydrich one of the most powerful figures in the general administration of Nazi Germany. Lina enjoyed the privileges that came with this power, embracing an expensive lifestyle and social status her parents could never have imagined.
While she enjoyed luxury, her husband participated in the crimes of Nazi Germany. One of them was the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 to 10, 1938, when orchestrated violence against Jews erupted across Germany and annexed Austria.
In this planned pogrom, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, Heydrich played a crucial role, and Lina actively supported him and encouraged him to act even more brutally. Both Reinhard and Lina had several affairs.
Because Heydrich's duties required long working hours and frequent absences from home, Lina would later recall, "I was married to Reinhard Heydrich for 10 years. He was not home for seven of those years."
The turning point came on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Occupied territories became laboratories of racial policy, and German security services expanded their reach and power.
Reinhard Heydrich played a leading role in coordinating measures against Jews, resistance fighters, and political opponents across occupied Europe. He organized and chaired the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where leading German officials coordinated the implementation of the Final Solution, meaning the systematic and physical murder of European Jews.
Before the Wannsee Conference, in September 1941, after Adolf Hitler dismissed Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath, Reinhard Heydrich was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. The position placed him at the top of the power hierarchy in the Protectorate.
For Lina, this was a social triumph. The family first resided in Prague Castle, the ancient seat of Czech kings, and then moved to the confiscated castle of Panenské Břežany near Prague.
The estate had belonged to the Jewish industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and had been seized after the German occupation. At Panenské Břežany, Lina felt she had reached her rightful status, later writing that she was a princess living in a fairy tale land.
The castle became a symbol of both privilege and repression. While she enjoyed receptions, gardens, and luxury, her husband ordered executions and mass arrests.
Special courts sentenced hundreds to death in the first months of his rule, and thousands were handed over to the Gestapo. Heydrich earned the nickname the Butcher of Prague.
Heydrich believed his repression had pacified the country and destroyed the Czechoslovak resistance, but he was wrong. On May 27, 1942, he was gravely wounded during an attack by two Czechoslovak soldiers sent from Great Britain, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš.
Heydrich died of infection on June 4, 1942, and his death triggered another round of brutal reprisals in the Protectorate.
Much changed after the death of Lina's husband. Lina, pregnant at the time, did not attend his funeral, and in July 1942 she gave birth to their fourth child, Marte.
Adolf Hitler granted her ownership of Panenské Břežany and secured a generous lifetime pension. She became a wealthy widow of a man considered a hero within the Nazi regime, in reality a mass murderer.
She soon transformed the estate according to her wishes. A playground and swimming pool were built, and Lina decided to destroy the English park with its rare trees.
She sold the wood and planted potatoes and other vegetables there, which she then sold to German troops in Prague. To run her business, she needed workers.
In the castle grounds, she set up a miniature labor and concentration camp where around 150 prisoners from the Terezín ghetto lived in former stables and worked for her under miserable conditions. Witnesses later testified that Lina insulted, spat on, and physically abused Jewish forced laborers.
She reportedly observed them through binoculars and ordered punishments for those who worked too slowly. When this labor force was withdrawn in February 1944, she obtained 15 Jehovah's Witnesses from the Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Even payment for these prisoners to the administration of the concentration camp became a dispute, and eventually Himmler himself covered the costs from his own account.
The death of her husband was not the only loss Lina suffered during her stay in the Protectorate. In an ironic twist of fate, Heydrich's son Klaus died on October 24, 1943, exactly one year after the Germans murdered the supporters of the Anthropoid group, which had killed Heydrich, along with their families in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
The 10-year-old Klaus rode out onto the street, where he was struck by a truck and was almost immediately dead. Jewish prisoners initially dug his grave, but Lina decided that her Aryan child should not be buried in a grave prepared by Jews.
German soldiers dug a new grave. She even demanded that Karel Kašpar, the driver involved in the accident, be shot, but an investigation found him not guilty, so he was not executed.
In April 1945, as Soviet forces approached, Lina fled with her children. Before leaving, she shook hands with staff and promised pensions, convinced she would return to the castle, but she never did.
She also had rabbits, geese, and chickens slaughtered, and took jars of preserved meat with her. After the war, the Czechoslovak court sentenced her in absentia to life imprisonment in 1948.
In Germany, she hid for a few years, fearing extradition, but in the end, despite her crimes, she was never handed over to Czechoslovakia. Later, she repeatedly applied for a general's pension, although her husband was considered a war criminal rather than a soldier.
Eventually, she received a widow's pension. In 1965, she married Finnish theater director Mauno Manninen, partly to change her surname.
She operated her former summer house on the German island of Fehmarn as a restaurant, where many visitors were former supporters of the Nazi regime who remembered the past with nostalgia.
When Lina Heydrich died on August 14, 1985, in Fehmarn, she was 74 years old. She showed no remorse to the victims of Nazism.
In 1979, six years before her death, she said, "National Socialism was a faith and I can never renounce this faith."