The municipality lies in the North Palatine Uplands in the Lauter valley at an elevation of roughly 175 m above sea level, about halfway between the towns of Lauterecken and Wolfstein.

The Lauter Valley Railway runs along the brook's left bank with a stop in the village's south end.

In 1282, King Rudolph I of Germany gave Count Heinrich III of Hohenecken and his wife Margarethe leave to sell the estate of Mittelrohrbach, a royal fief, with all its appurtenances and serfs to Otterberg Abbey.

Against this sale, the king accepted from the comital couple the Lampertsmühle (a mill) and a meadow in Heinzemanneshusen sub Castro Wolvestein, that is to say, beneath the castle of Wolfstein.

Among them is a 1379 document according to which Count Friedrich II of Veldenz enfeoffed Johann Mohr von Sötern with holdings in Heinzenhausen.

In 1422, Count Friedrich III of Veldenz enfeoffed the brothers Johann and Philipp Boos von Waldeck with a series of villages, along with the estate of Wusthausen and his own holdings in Heinzenhausen.

The Barons von Boos zu Waldeck owned an estate in Heinzenhausen until the end of feudal times when the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank were occupied by French Revolutionary troops.

Count Friedrich III was the last from the Hohengeroldseck family to rule Veldenz - that male line died out with him in 1444, and the county passed to his son-in-law Stephen, Count Palatine of Simmern-Zweibrücken, a son of Rupert, King of Germany and widower of Frederick's daughter, Anna of Veldenz.

Stephen, combining his lands, created the new County Palatine of Zweibrücken, which in the fullness of time came to be known as the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken.

[6] In 1532, when a young Wolfgang, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken inherited his holdings, his uncle Rupert served as the child's regent.

In 1543, when Wolfgang reached majority and took on the responsibility of office, he enacted the Marburg Contract, giving Rupert the County of Veldenz, including Heinzenhausen with it.

However, during the Thirty Years' War, the nearby residence town of Lauterecken afforded the villagers shelter, and it was never overrun by the French.

Johann Goswin Widder, in his 1788 work Geographische Beschreibung der Kurpfalz (“Geographical Description of Electoral Palatinate”), wrote about Heinzenhausen, among other things: “Heinzenhausen, a slight little village of 15 houses on the Lauter’s right bank, lying half an hour up from Lauterecke, was called long ago Heinzemanneshusen … Nevertheless, the village seems to have been subject, with the Vogtei, at all times to the Counts of Veldenz and Castle Lauterecke.”[7] During the time of the French Revolution and Napoleonic times, the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank were annexed by France.

After the Second World War, the Bavarian exclave on the Rhine’s left bank was grouped into the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

In the course of the 1968 administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Heinzenhausen was grouped as a self-administering Ortsgemeinde into the Verbandsgemeinde of Lauterecken with effect from 1 January 1972.

Thus, Heinzenhausen has become a small residential community with job opportunities in the area's major centres (Lauterecken, Wolfstein, Kaiserslautern).

[14] Heinzenhausen's mayor is Frank Kohl, and his deputies are Sonja Wolke and Henning Baldauf [15] The municipality's arms might be described thus: Per fess wavy sable a demilion Or armed, langued and crowned gules and argent a waterwheel spoked of four azure surmounted by a bridge arched of two issuant from base set slightly to sinister of the field (?)

The arms have been borne since 1986 when they were approved by the now defunct Rheinhessen-Pfalz Regierungsbezirk administration in Neustadt an der Weinstraße.