15 March 1939, Prague, Czechoslovakia.

From early morning, people stand in the streets and on the pavements, watching in stunned  silence as German troops march into the city.

Some stare openly, others whisper anxiously, as  armoured vehicles roll across the cobblestones and soldiers take positions at bridges,  ministries, and railway stations.

Crowds also gather in Wenceslas Square and along  the roads leading up to Prague Castle, where the symbols of a sovereign state of  Czechoslovakia are quietly removed.

By afternoon, the swastika flies above the city and the  capital of Czechoslovakia has fallen without a single battle.

Fear settles over the  city as arrests begin and Jewish families understand that their property as well  as their lives are no longer protected.

In the days that follow, the castle  and the confiscated estates surrounding   Prague become seats of a new power that  rules through executions, mass arrests, and calculated terror.

During the Second World  War, which is swiftly approaching, one of the most ruthless men of the regime will take control  of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

His brutality will earn him the name Butcher of  Prague, as he will send thousands of people to their deaths and prisons.

Beside him will stand  a woman who shares his inhuman beliefs, embraces the privileges of conquest, and settles into a  castle taken from its Jewish owner, benefiting   directly from the repression that spreads across  the Protectorate.

Her name is Lina Heydrich.

Lina Heydrich was born as Lina Mathilde von Osten  on 14 June 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 schoolteacher.

Her mother Mathilde, came from a business family, and managed the household.

Lina grew up  in an environment shaped by German defeat in the First World War, resentment against the  Weimar Republic that emerged after the fall of the German Empire in 1918, and hostility  toward Jews and the political left.

Lina absorbed these ideas early and she 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 the port city of Kiel in 1928.

Her life changed on 6  December 1930 at a rowing club ball in Kiel.

There she met a naval officer Reinhard Heydrich.

He was  ambitious, intelligent, and socially confident.

Within less than two weeks, on 18 December 1930,  they announced their engagement.

At that time Heydrich had already promised marriage to another  woman, the daughter of a senior naval officer, but he broke this promise to be with Lina.

This  led to a scandal and in April 1931 a military court of honour forced Heydrich to resign from the  German Navy for dishonouring the officer corps.

This devastated him, as his career appeared to  be ruined but Lina reacted differently – she saw opportunity in this crisis.

At the same  time, she already supported the Nazi Party and encouraged Heydrich 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 at the end impressed by him and  hired him.

At the end of this important year for Heydrich, on 26 December 1931, he married Lina  and in the following years they had four children together: Klaus, Heider, Silke, and Marte.

Heydrich quickly proved his ability to Himmler.

He created and expanded the Sicherheitsdienst  – the 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 these developments of  her husband with pride.

In letters to her parents, she described 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, the Secret State Police, and the Criminal Police  into one centralized structure.

This made Heydrich one of the most powerful figures in the internal  administration of Nazi Germany.

Lina enjoyed the privileges that came with this power.

She  embraced an expensive lifestyle and social status that 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 9 to 10 November 1938, when orchestrated violence against Jews  erupted across Germany and annexed Austria.

In this planned pogrom, known also 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 Reinhard 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 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the Second World  War began.

Occupied territories by Nazi Germany 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 organised and chaired the infamous Wannsee  Conference in January 1942, where leading German officials coordinated the implementation of the  Final Solution of the Jewish Question, 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.

This position placed him at the top of the power hierarchy in the Protectorate.

For Lina, this was 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.

She later wrote 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.

Thousands were handed over to the Gestapo and 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 27 May 1942, he was gravely  wounded during the attack done by two Czechoslovak soldiers, sent from Great Britain, Jozef Gabčík  and Jan Kubiš.

Heydrich died of infection on 4 June 1942 and his death triggered another  round of brutal reprisals in the Protectorate.

A lot changed after the death of Lina´s husband.

Lina, pregnant at the time, did not attend the funeral of her husband 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 the German troops in Prague.

In order to run her business, she needed workers  and in the castle grounds, she set up a miniature labour and concentration camp, where around 150  prisoners from the Theresienstadt ghetto lived in former stables and worked for Lina Heydrich under  miserable conditions.

Witnesses later testified that Lina insulted, spat on, and physically  abused Jewish forced labourers.

She reportedly observed them through binoculars and ordered  punishment for those who worked too slowly.

When this labour force was withdrawn in February  1944, she obtained fifteen 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, however, was not the only loss Lina suffered during her stay in  the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

In an ironic twist of fate, Heydrich’s son Klaus  died on 24 October 1943.

This was 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.

10-year-old Klaus rode out onto the street where he was struck  by a truck coming down the road 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 at the  end she was, despite her crimes, 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 theatre director  Mauno Manninen, partly to change her surname.

She operated her former summer house on the  German Island of Fehmarn as a restaurant and inn.

Many visitors were former supporters of the Nazi  regime who remembered the past with nostalgia.

When Lina Heydrich died on 14 August 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.

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