Lina Heydrich
Lina Mathilde von Osten was born on the 14th of June 1911 on the German island of Fehmarn, in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of Denmark.
In 1929 she attended a rally, and after hearing Hitler speak, she joined the Nazi party. The following year at a rowing club event in Kiel, North Germany, she met German Naval Lieutenant Heydrich and became engaged on the 18th of December, 1930. They married in 1931 and had four children.
Her husband became the effective ruler of occupied Czechoslovakia, which he ruled with a cruel iron fist. On the 27th of May 1942, Reinhard was fatally wounded in a bomb attack on the way to his office in Prague. He died a week later.
After the war, Lina moved back into her house on Fehmarn Island, which had been used by the British Army as accommodation. Lina was arrested and tried during the German de-Nazification proceedings but was cleared of all charges. However, the Czechoslovakian supreme court tried her for war crimes in absentia and was sentenced to life imprisonment, which she never served.
In 1956 she successfully took the West German government to court, claiming her widow’s pension because her husband was a General in the German Police force and killed in action. The pension had been previously suspended because of Heydrich’s role in the holocaust.
In 1965 Lina married the Finnish theatre director Mauno Manninen, and they converted their island summerhouse to a restaurant, which they operated until it accidentally burnt down in February 1969.
Mauno died later in 1969, and Lina published her memoir Life with a war Criminal in 1976. She never repented of her Nazi affiliations and continued to defend her first husband’s reputation until she died on the island on the 14th of August 1985, aged seventy-four.
