The daughter of a minor German aristocrat (he worked as a village schoolteacher), she joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and met Reinhard Heydrich in December 1930.

Lina's older brother Hans had joined the Nazi Party and was a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA).

[2][3] On 6 December 1930, aged 19, she attended a rowing-club ball in Kiel and met then Naval Lieutenant Heydrich there.

[5] Lina persuaded Heydrich to look into the recently formed Schutzstaffel (SS) as a career option.

In August, he was transferred to Munich where he lived alone in a boarding house, which rented rooms to unmarried SS men.

[11] In 1941 the family moved to the Lower Castle of Panenské Břežany (Czech:Dolní zámek v Panenských Břežanech) which was originally owned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish magnate in the European sugar industry.

[12] Following the assassination of her husband in Operation Anthropoid in June 1942, Hitler gave Lina the country estate in recognition of his service.

Lina sold the other family properties, including the home in Berlin and the hunting lodge near Nauen in the autumn of 1942.

[15] The Heydrich family lived at Jungfern-Breschan until April 1945 when they, along with many other Germans fled the area before the arrival of the advancing Soviet Red Army.

She ran the Heydrich's former summer house on Fehmarn as a restaurant and inn until it burned down in February 1969, during welding work within the roofspace that caught the thatched roof alight.

[19] Throughout her later years, Lina Heydrich defended the reputation of her first husband until her own death at the age of 74 on 14 August 1985 in Fehmarn.

[19] She vehemently denies that her husband was involved in the Holocaust, and tries to redefine the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where the "Endlösung" (final solution) was decided, merely as resettling the Jews in the East: "One day he [Heydrich] told me that a decision had been made in Hitlers Headquarters, to create a big reservation for the Jews in Russia, which could be developed into a Jewish State.