Lina Mathilde Heydrich-von Osten, born 04-06-1911 on Fehmarn, the daughter of a minor German aristocrat who worked as a schoolteacher. Lina met Reinhard Heydrich
in December 1930, and was married 26-12-1931. They had four children. She claimed that she knew nothing about Reinhard Heydrich’s crimes committed while he was head of the RSHA, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Main Security Office.
Lina von Osten met the then Naval Leutnant Heydrich on 06-12-1930, at a gala hosted by the school rowing club in Kiel which Lina attended
There was an immediate attraction and after only a few dates the couple became engaged on 18-12-1930. Lina von Osten was nineteen at the time and was already a member of the NSDAP
, Heydrich was not, and she, and her Nazi connections, helped put Heydrich in the way of what turned out to be his spectacular Nazi career. After Heydrich’s dismissal from the navy, they married at a small church in Grossenbrode
on 26-12-1931. Lina Heydrich gave birth to two sons, Klaus, born 17-06-1933, and Heider, born 13-12-1934.
By the late 1930’s, the duties of Reinhard Heydrich led him to work long hours and often be away from home. This left Lina at home with the children and having to run the household alone. The serious strain on their marriage nearly resulted in divorce. However, the reconciled Heydrich couple had another child, a daughter named Silke,
born 09-04-1939. Reinhard proudly showed off his baby daughter and they had a close relationship. Their fourth child, a daughter named Marte, born 23-07-1942, looking like her father,
was born shortly after Reinhard Heydrich’s death. Reinhard Heydrich was attacked in Prague on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile (see Edvard Beneš)
to kill him in an operation code named Operation Anthropoid. Jan Kubish and Josef Gabcik
attacked his staff car and threw a hand grenade in the car which wounded Heydrich. He died from his injuries a week later. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky.
Lidice was razed to the ground; all adult males were executed, and all but a handful of its women and children were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps. In 1944, Lina Heydrich had Heider removed from the Hitler Youth out of fear that he may meet the same fate as his father.





Death and burial ground of Heydrich-von Osten, Lina Mathilde.






