The morning of May 27th, 1942, began like most others for Reinhard Heydrich. The acting Reich protector of Bohemia and Moravia climbed into his open-topped Mercedes-Benz staff car and set out from the Panenské Břežany estate north of Prague, where his family lived, toward Prague Castle, where he kept his offices. He traveled this route daily, in an open car, a deliberate piece of theater meant to show that the man Hitler himself would later call the one with the iron heart feared no one. The car slowed to negotiate a hairpin bend on a street called Kirchmayerova in the Prague suburb of Kobylisy.
A man stepped forward with a Sten submachine gun. It jammed. Instead of ordering his driver to speed away, Heydrich stood up in the car and drew his pistol, unwilling to flee from a lone attacker. In that moment, another man threw a modified anti-tank grenade.
It exploded under the rear wheel, driving fragments of metal and horsehair from the upholstery deep into his body. His spleen was ruptured. He staggered into the road, gun in hand, tried to pursue his attackers, and collapsed from blood loss. He was rushed to Bulovka Hospital in Prague.
For eight days he hovered between life and death as German doctors flown in from Berlin treated his wounds. For a time it seemed he might survive. Hitler was kept informed of every development. Himmler visited the hospital.
Messages of concern arrived from across the senior ranks of the Nazi regime. But on June 4th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich died. He was 38 years old. The cause was septicemia, almost certainly aggravated by the horsehair driven into his body cavity that the surgeons could not fully remove.
Some historians have also suggested that certain treatment decisions made by the German medical staff may have worsened his condition. At the family estate north of Prague, his wife Lina received the news that would reshape every remaining day of her life. She was 30 years old, heavily pregnant with their fourth child, and a widow. Lina Mathilde Heydrich, née von Osten, was born on June 14th, 1911, on Fehmarn, a small island in the Baltic Sea off the coast of what is now northern Germany.
She came from a family with conservative nationalist leanings. Her encounter with Reinhard Heydrich at a naval dance in Kiel in December 1930 was immediate and intense, their courtship swift, their engagement swifter still, though complicated by the fact that Heydrich was at the time involved with another woman. That earlier relationship, and his failure to handle it honorably, contributed directly to his dismissal from the Navy in April 1931 after a naval honor court ruled his conduct improper. Lina, far from distancing herself, stood by him.
She had been introduced to national socialism by her brother and was already a convinced believer. They married on December 26th, 1931, in a ceremony attended by Heinrich Himmler. As Heydrich’s power rose to extraordinary heights, Lina moved within the highest circles of the Third Reich. She met Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, virtually every senior figure in the Nazi hierarchy.
She was formidable in her own right, strong-willed, opinionated, not easily intimidated even by her husband’s fearsome reputation. She had strong opinions about policy, was not afraid to express them, and was known to argue with him in ways most people would not have dared argue with one of the most dangerous men in Germany. They had four children together. Klaus, the eldest, was born on July 17th, 1933.
Heider arrived on December 23rd, 1934. A daughter, Silke, was born on April 9th, 1939, months before the outbreak of war. The youngest, another daughter named Marte, came into the world on July 23rd, 1942, six weeks after her father had already died. She was, in the most literal sense, a child born into the aftermath of his death, a child who would never know him except through the accounts of others.
The Nazi state gave Heydrich a state funeral of enormous pomp. His coffin lay in state in Prague Castle, and tens of thousands of Czechs, many compelled to attend, filed past it. The cortege moved to Berlin by special train, where another ceremony was held at the Reich Chancellery. Hitler delivered a lengthy and emotional eulogy, praising Heydrich as one of the finest men the German race had produced.
Heydrich was buried with full military honors in Berlin’s Invalidenfriedhof. Lina stood at the graveside, widowed, pregnant, surrounded by the most powerful men in Germany. Even as the Third Reich mourned with its full theatrical apparatus, the reprisals were already underway. On June 10th, 1942, six days after Heydrich’s death, the entire village of Lidice, near Kladno in Bohemia, was destroyed.
The SS and German police surrounded the village before dawn, acting on false and fabricated intelligence linking the village to the British agents responsible for the assassination. Every man and boy over the age of 15, 173 people in total, was taken out and shot against the walls of a local farm that same morning. The women, 184 in total, were loaded onto trucks and transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where many later died. Ninety children were taken into German custody.
Most were deemed unsuitable for Germanization and killed by carbon monoxide poisoning at the Chełmno extermination camp. The village itself was burned to the ground, the ashes bulldozed into the earth, the wells filled with rubble. The Nazis attempted to erase Lidice from the face of the earth. A second village, Ležáky, where a radio transmitter used by a resistance network connected to the paratroopers had been discovered, was similarly destroyed on June 24th, 1942.
The entire adult population was executed. Two children were taken for possible Germanization, and the village was razed. In all, the reprisals for the assassination resulted in the deaths of approximately 5,000 Czech people, including those killed at Lidice and Ležáky, those executed in mass shootings across the protectorate, and those who died in subsequent arrests and deportations. The assassins themselves were eventually tracked to a church in Prague.
The Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Resslova Street had sheltered them, along with several other paratroopers from related operations, since the assassination. On June 18th, 1942, after being betrayed by a fellow paratrooper named Karel Čurda, motivated by the enormous reward and by fear, the church was surrounded by hundreds of SS troops supported by armored vehicles. The battle lasted for several hours. The paratroopers in the nave held out with extraordinary courage before being killed or choosing to die.
The three in the crypt, including Gabčík and Kubiš, fought until their ammunition was exhausted. Water was pumped into the crypt in an attempt to flood them out. They took their own lives rather than surrender. Their deaths marked the end of Operation Anthropoid, but the consequences were only beginning to unfold.
For Lina Heydrich, the immediate years following her husband’s death were, in a cruel paradox, years of relative comfort. The Nazi state, honoring its fallen hero, continued to support his widow generously. She remained at Panenské Břežany, the grand estate Heydrich had requisitioned from a Jewish family deported to the camps. The estate, known in German as Jungfern-Breschan, included a large manor house, extensive agricultural land, outbuildings and grounds that Lina managed with characteristic efficiency.
The family who had owned it, the Bloch-Bauers, were prominent Jewish industrialists. They had been forced to flee or were deported, and their property seized. Heydrich moved his family in when he took up his position, and Lina organized it as a working household and farm. She gave birth to Marte in July 1942.
She managed the agricultural work, oversaw the household, and attempted to create some kind of normal family life for her children amidst the surrounding catastrophe. But even within this relative security, tragedy struck. On October 24th, 1943, Klaus Heydrich, the eldest son, just 10 years old, rode his bicycle into the path of a German military truck near the estate. He was killed instantly.
He had been nine when his father was assassinated, old enough to dimly understand that something terrible had happened, young enough that the full meaning was beyond him. He did not live long enough to wrestle with that meaning, or with the darker truths about who his father had been. His death was a grief upon grief for Lina, who had now lost both husband and firstborn within seventeen months. What did Lina tell her children about their father as they grew?
These private conversations are not recorded, but given everything known about her subsequent public positions, it is not difficult to imagine the version she presented. He would have been a hero, a warrior for Germany, a man who had given his life for his country and been taken by enemies who were also Germany’s enemies. The ideology he served, the crimes he committed, none of these would have featured in Lina’s domestic narrative. She would have given her children a father to be proud of.
That was, after all, what she herself believed. The collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 shattered the world that had sustained Lina and her children. As Soviet and Allied forces closed in, she faced a future that was suddenly terrifyingly uncertain. She was the widow of one of the most senior architects of genocide in human history, living in occupied Czech territory that would shortly be liberated and reclaimed by the people who had suffered under her husband’s rule.
When the war ended in May 1945, the consequences were immediate. She was expelled from Czechoslovakia along with millions of Sudeten Germans and Reich Germans, part of the enormous postwar population transfer that moved an estimated 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans out of Eastern Europe. She was stripped of the Panenské Břežany estate, which was returned to the Czech state. She and her children were pushed westward with whatever they could carry.
She left behind the grave of Klaus, the agricultural enterprise she had built, and the last physical connection to the years of her husband’s greatest power. They ended up in Bavaria, in a country ruined, occupied, and slowly trying to come to terms with the magnitude of what it had done. Lina found herself a widow in reduced circumstances with three children to feed and educate in a country conducting a systematic attempt to identify, try, and punish everyone who had played a significant role in the crimes of the Third Reich. She was interrogated extensively by Allied investigators and called to give testimony in various proceedings connected to the trials of her husband’s former subordinates.
The question of whether she could be directly implicated was examined and ultimately resolved against prosecution. The evidence was insufficient to support specific criminal charges against her personally, and the focus of major prosecutions was on those who directly participated in planning and executing crimes. She did, however, face denazification proceedings. She was ultimately classified at a level that carried financial penalties and various restrictions, but did not involve imprisonment.
The classification made clear she was considered an active participant in the Nazi world, but that the threshold for criminal prosecution was not met. Rather than retreating into obscurity, rather than adopting a posture of shame or silence, Lina Heydrich spent the decades after the war fighting back. She fought for her widow’s pension with relentless determination. She fought to recover whatever assets could be recovered.
She fought against what she described as the unfair historical treatment of her husband and herself. She maintained contact with networks of former SS members and their families. And ultimately she wrote a book that encapsulated her defiance in the most public possible way. The pension battle was the most prolonged and significant of her postwar legal struggles.
Heydrich had held some of the most senior positions in the Nazi state, with ranks and salaries to match, and in formal terms this should have entitled his widow to a substantial pension. The fundamental legal question was whether the criminality of the activities conducted in those official positions should disqualify the entitlement. Different courts gave different answers at different times, and the proceedings became a running commentary on West Germany’s ongoing, agonized relationship with its Nazi past. In the 1950s, when many former Nazis were being quietly reintegrated into German society, there was considerable pressure to resolve these questions in ways that would allow former Nazi families to settle down.
In the 1960s and beyond, as the public reckoning intensified, the opposite pressure applied. Her case went through multiple rounds of the German court system over more than two decades. At various points she received partial awards; at other points those awards were challenged. The proceedings generated substantial press coverage, which Lina found both useful and maddening, because the coverage invariably framed the issue in terms of her husband’s crimes.
The eventual outcome, in the early 1970s, was a compromise that satisfied no one entirely. She received some pension entitlement, at a level critics regarded as inappropriately generous given the source of her husband’s rank, and that she regarded as inadequate. The proceedings left a bitter taste and contributed to subsequent changes in German law that made it harder for the families of Nazi perpetrators to claim pension benefits. In this ironic way, Lina’s persistent legal battles actually contributed to strengthening legal provisions that other perpetrator families might have hoped to exploit.
Throughout all of this, she was also engaged in the cultural battle for her husband’s memory. She gave interviews, speaking with remarkable candor about her refusal to accept the historical consensus. She maintained her network of contacts with former SS members and their families, participating in the social world of the unrepentant Nazi survivor community that existed below the surface of respectable West German society. In the 1960s, she was identified as one of the participants in a network that provided financial and logistical support to former SS members facing legal proceedings, overlapping with but not identical to Stille Hilfe.
The activities did not result in criminal charges against her, but they added to the picture of a woman who was not a widow trying to live a quiet life, but an active participant in an ongoing ideological community. Published in 1976, Lina’s memoir was titled in German Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher, which translates as Life with a War Criminal. The title was not her choice. It had been imposed by the publisher, Grabert Verlag in Preußisch Oldendorf, as a condition of publication, apparently to give the book a veneer of critical engagement its content did not support.
Lina was furious about the title and said so openly. In her view, it was a lie against her husband, because she did not accept that he had been a war criminal in any meaningful sense. The contents of the book were a vigorous and essentially unapologetic defense of Reinhard Heydrich. The book caused enormous controversy.
Historians were outraged by its revisionism and its dismissal of documented evidence. Reviews in major German newspapers were withering. Survivor organizations condemned it. But it found its audience among those who wanted to believe the accepted historical account was distorted, and it sold well enough to provide Lina with some financial benefit.
For Heider Heydrich, the oldest of the surviving children, the consequences of growing up in this world were profound and lasting. Born on December 23rd, 1934, he was seven when his father was appointed acting Reich protector, seven and a half when his father was assassinated, nine when his older brother was killed, and ten when Germany collapsed entirely. He grew up in a household where the dominant narrative was one of grievance and revisionism, where his father was presented as a hero falsely condemned. As the postwar decades passed, the gap between his mother’s world and the world beyond the front door was disorienting and impossible to bridge.
By all available accounts, Heider became a man who tried to lead an ordinary life while carrying an extraordinary burden. He went into business, working much of his life in the food industry in Germany. He settled in the Federal Republic, married, had children. But he could not easily remain invisible.
His name appeared in books and articles about his father. He was contacted by journalists, historians, and filmmakers. In various interviews over the decades, he occupied an unusual position. He did not, like Gudrun Himmler, become a public defender of his father’s ideology.
But he also did not, like Niklas Frank, become a fierce public denouncer. His position was more ambivalent, centered on the complexity of being a child who had loved a parent without knowing that parent as the world came to know him. In some interviews, he spoke with apparent sincerity about the difficulty of reconciling the father he remembered as a small child with the historical figure the records revealed. He acknowledged the historical reality of the Holocaust and did not attempt to minimize it the way his mother had.
But he was also protective of certain aspects of his personal memory, and his relationship with his father’s legacy was never one of clean, uncomplicated condemnation. For a person of conscience who also retained genuine childhood memories of a father’s presence, fully and publicly condemning his father would have meant the destruction of the only private image of a father he had ever had. It does not excuse the failure to do it fully. But it explains it.
Heider lived to 86, dying on December 24th, 2020, on Christmas Eve, one day after what would have been his 86th birthday. He had outlived his mother by 35 years, his brother by 77 years, and had lived to see his father become one of the most studied figures of the entire Nazi era. He had lived through the founding of the Federal Republic, the Berlin Wall’s construction and fall, German reunification, the 60th, 70th, and 75th anniversaries of the end of the war. In his final years he lived quietly.
The news of his death was noted in the German press with brief factual reports. He was identified as the son of the assassinated Reich protector. And then the reports moved on. There was no great outpouring of public grief.
He had lived and died carrying his name and his history to the end, and the world noted his passing briefly and moved on. A man who had spent his life trying to be simply himself rather than merely his father’s son, who died and was remembered primarily as his father’s son. That was the final weight of the Heydrich inheritance. Silke Heydrich, born April 9th, 1939, was just three when her father was assassinated and six when the war ended.
After the war, she largely disappeared from the public record. She gave virtually no interviews, made no public statements, and structured her life around keeping as great a distance as possible from the notoriety attached to her surname. Whether she changed her name, whether she married and acquired a different surname, whether she built a professional identity that did not require her to use the name Heydrich, the public record cannot definitively answer. What is clear is that she chose a path as different as possible from her mother’s conspicuous public engagement.
Marte Heydrich, the youngest, born July 23rd, 1942, six weeks after her father died, occupies perhaps the most poignant position in the family story. She never saw him. She was not merely an infant who had lost her father at a young age like Silke. She was a child born into the already established absence of her father, for whom the word father was from the very beginning a category populated not by memory or experience, but only by story and history.
Her relationship to his legacy was always mediated entirely through other people’s accounts: through her mother’s highly partial narrative, through the historical record, through the relentless public interest in the man whose name she bore. For Heider, even the faintest memory of his father could be held against the historical record as a kind of countervailing personal testimony. For Marte, there was nothing to hold against it. The father she had was entirely constructed from outside.
She came into the world after the man was already gone. Like Silke, she avoided the public eye in her adult life. All three of the surviving Heydrich children made the consistent choice of privacy over public engagement, of retreat over confrontation, of anonymous private lives over the conspicuous public profiles their mother had carved out. The broader family circle was also consumed by the war’s catastrophe.
Heydrich’s mother, Elisabeth Maria Heydrich, née Krantz, born in 1879, had raised three children in the conservative, nationally minded milieu of the German bourgeoisie. Bruno Heydrich, the father, had died in 1938, before the war began, and never saw where his son’s career would ultimately lead. Throughout Reinhard’s lifetime, persistent rumors circulated that the family had Jewish ancestry. Heydrich commissioned extensive genealogical research to disprove the claims, and Himmler personally vouched for his Aryan credentials.
But the rumors never entirely died, and they added a particularly cruel dimension: a man who devoted his life to persecuting Jewish people lived with the permanent possibility that history might record him as being among those he was destroying. Some have argued his extraordinary viciousness was partly driven by these rumors, an attempt to inoculate himself against the accusation by making himself the most conspicuous possible persecutor. Elisabeth died in 1943, while the war was still ongoing. She died before the liberation, before the trials, before the full public reckoning.
She had lived long enough to see her son rise to the pinnacle of power, to grieve his assassination, to mourn her grandson Klaus. She died without ever fully reckoning with what the regime she had supported was doing. Heydrich’s brother, Heinz Siegfried Heydrich, born in 1905, the elder sibling, never attained his younger brother’s prominence. He was not a member of the SS elite.
He served in the Wehrmacht, the regular German army, and was deployed to the Eastern Front, where Germany lost over two million men dead alone. Heinz Heydrich died in action on the Eastern Front in 1944, one of the millions consumed by the catastrophe Nazi Germany had unleashed on the Soviet Union. His death left the family without its two eldest males. The family’s male line had been essentially eliminated.
The surviving members, Lina with her children and Reinhard’s sister, were left to face the postwar world. For the Czechs, Heydrich remained one of the most hated figures in their modern history. The memory of Lidice became a central element of Czech national identity. The Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, where the paratroopers made their last stand, was restored and made into a memorial.
The bullet marks from the June 18th, 1942 battle were preserved, and a museum in the crypt commemorates the paratroopers and the Czech civilians who helped them at the cost of their own lives. The rebuilt village of Lidice rose from the ashes through national determination and international solidarity. The original site was preserved as a memorial garden with a rose garden containing roses donated from around the world and a haunting bronze sculpture depicting the 82 Lidice children taken by the Nazis and killed. The names of all the victims are recorded on memorial plaques.
The surviving women who returned from Ravensbrück rebuilt their community. “Lidice lives” ran the village’s postwar motto. For the Heydrich children, the name Lidice must have had a particular weight. The connection between their father’s death and the destruction of the village was direct, documented, and inescapable.
Even Lina, prepared to minimize virtually everything else, does not appear to have challenged the account of the Lidice massacre. That was too well documented, too viscerally present. The children of Reinhard Heydrich grew up knowing that their father’s assassination had been the direct cause of the murder of hundreds of Czech civilians, including 82 children. The trial of Karl Hermann Frank, Heydrich’s principal subordinate in the protectorate who coordinated the reprisals, deserves attention.
Frank was captured by American forces and handed over to the Czechoslovak authorities, who tried him in Prague in 1946. He was found guilty of war crimes, including the Lidice massacre, and executed by hanging on May 22nd, 1946, before a crowd of thousands of Czech citizens. The evidence presented documented the system that Heydrich had built. Heydrich, being dead, was not in the dock, but his shadow was present throughout.
The Czech dimension of the family’s story also extends to the property question. The Bloch-Bauers, from whom the Panenské estate had been stolen, were a prominent Jewish industrial family. Their broader story intersects in a remarkable way with another famous restitution case: Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had been the patron and subject of Gustav Klimt’s famous 1907 portrait, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, often called The Woman in Gold. His niece, Maria Altmann, spent years fighting the Austrian government for the return of the Klimt paintings seized from the family during the Nazi period.
Her eventual success, in a case that went to the United States Supreme Court and resulted in the return of the paintings in 2006, became the subject of a major film. The Panenské estate itself was a separate and less celebrated dimension of the same pattern of Nazi theft. The fact that Lina Heydrich had been living on property stolen from a family whose cultural treasures would become the subject of a landmark restitution case is one of those historical ironies that underlines the interconnectedness of Nazi crimes and their long aftermath. The historical context of how Germany’s relationship with the Nazi past evolved shaped the conditions in which the Heydrich family lived.
In the 1950s, West Germany was dominated by the instinct to look forward. The denazification process had been wound down with considerable incompleteness. Former Nazis served in the judiciary, the civil service, academia, business, and politics. The dominant social convention was a kind of collective amnesia.
For the Heydrich family, this was in some respects convenient. But it also meant the reckoning that eventually came arrived with greater force precisely because it had been so long delayed. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963 to 1965, the student movements of the late 1960s, and the publication of major historical works all brought Heydrich’s name into circulation in ever more detailed and damning contexts. Gunther Deschner’s 1977 biography, Heydrich: The Pursuit of Total Power, provided a thorough, well-sourced assessment that systematically demolished any remaining claim that he had been merely a professional functionary rather than a driving ideological force behind the Holocaust.
The minutes of the Wannsee Conference alone, with Heydrich’s name on every page as convenor and chair, were sufficient to establish his central role. No amount of personal testimony from a devoted widow could alter that record. Adolf Eichmann himself had been one of Heydrich’s most important subordinates, responsible for coordinating the logistics of deportations to the death camps. He had attended the Wannsee Conference and been present for Heydrich’s chairing of that meeting.
His capture in Argentina in May 1960, trial in Jerusalem in 1961, and execution in 1962 brought Heydrich’s name back into prominent public discussion, with extensive documentary evidence about the precise mechanics of the Holocaust in which Heydrich figured prominently. The specific role Heydrich played in the Einsatzgruppen operations deserves emphasis. The mobile killing units that accompanied the German forces into the Soviet Union were organized and controlled by the RSHA, which Heydrich led. The operational orders were issued by him.
The reports of their activities, the Ereignismeldungen, were submitted directly to him. He knew in meticulous detail what was being done. By the time he died in June 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered over half a million Jewish people, mainly in mass shootings at sites like Babi Yar outside Kiev, where on September 29th and 30th, 1941, more than 33,000 Jewish people were shot in a ravine in one of the single largest mass murders of the entire Holocaust. He read the reports.
He signed off on the operations. He was not a distant bureaucrat who could plausibly claim ignorance. This is why the historical record is so definitive, why Lina’s counternarrative was so fundamentally untenable. The chain of command from Heydrich’s desk in Berlin to the killing sites was direct, documented, and traceable.
The Wannsee Conference itself, on January 20th, 1942, at a villa in the Wannsee district of Berlin requisitioned from a Jewish businessman, lasted approximately 90 minutes. Fifteen senior officials attended. The minutes, recorded by Eichmann, who served as meeting secretary, and preserved in the German Foreign Ministry files, record Heydrich’s opening statement identifying himself as authorized by Reich Marshal Göring to make preparations for the final solution. He presented, in bureaucratic language of extraordinary coldness, the scope of the task: approximately 11 million Jews of Europe, listed by country, to be subjected to evacuation, the Nazi euphemism for deportation and murder.
There was no disagreement. The meeting took place less than five months before Heydrich was assassinated. For Lina to have written her memoir dismissing this record required either comprehensive ignorance of the available evidence or comprehensive willingness to deny it. Given her intelligence and her connections, the latter seems far more likely.
She knew what the documents said. She had chosen not to believe them. Lina Heydrich died in August 1985, still denying, still fighting, still the most conspicuous embodiment of a particular failure of moral reckoning. Her children lived longer and quieter lives, carrying the weight of their name into the 21st century, and then one by one laying it down.
What they took with them when they went, what peace or resolution or continued anguish they found, is something history cannot tell us, and perhaps was never meant to be told. The relationship between heroism and atrocity in the story of Operation Anthropoid is one historians have wrestled with extensively. Gabčík and Kubiš were undoubtedly courageous men who willingly accepted enormous personal risk in service of a just cause. The Czech civilians who sheltered them were equally courageous.
At the same time, the decision to proceed with the assassination, taken in London by Czech officials who knew massive reprisals would follow, involved a moral calculation of extraordinary difficulty. The Czech government in exile made the decision knowing Czechs would die as a result. History has generally, though not universally, judged that decision to have been just given the enormity of what Heydrich was doing. But the people of Lidice did not make that decision, and they paid for it with their lives.
The question of whether the children of Reinhard Heydrich ever visited the memorials at Lidice or in the crypt of the Prague church is one the historical record cannot answer. Perhaps they did, privately, anonymously. Perhaps the weight of the name drove them away. Perhaps they found their own private ways of acknowledging what their father had done.
Or perhaps, as seems most likely given the environment in which they were raised, they simply tried to live their lives as normally as possible and keep as great a distance as they could from the history their name connected them to. In the years since Heider’s death in December 2020, the living link between the Heydrich family and anyone who could claim direct personal memory of Reinhard Heydrich has been effectively severed. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren, if they exist, wherever they live their private lives, are members of a generation for whom their great-grandfather is as much a historical figure as a family ancestor. The personal memory, always fragmentary and contested, has given way entirely to the historical record.
That record is overwhelming, thoroughly documented, and irrefutable. It tells the story of a man struck down at the age of 38 by men willing to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of those around them to stop him, or at least to make him pay. The family he left behind carried that history in their blood and their names for decades. They found different ways to manage it.
None of them fully adequate to the magnitude of what they had inherited. The memorial at Lidice, where roses bloom in the garden dedicated to the murdered children, carries a legacy that will outlast anything the Heydrich family ever said or did. The Wannsee Conference House in Berlin, where visitors can read the minutes of the meeting Heydrich chaired, preserves a legacy of historical truth that no revisionist memoir can challenge. The Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague, with its bullet-marked walls and crypt memorial, preserves the legacy of those who had the courage to strike back against one of the Holocaust’s architects at the cost of their own lives.
These memorials are the truest legacy. They exist not to remember Reinhard Heydrich, but to remember his victims and those who resisted him. They exist as permanent refutations of the denial and revisionism that Lina Heydrich spent her life promoting. And they exist as places where the weight of history can be felt and contemplated by anyone who has the courage to look at it directly.
A courage that, in the end, the Heydrich family itself was largely unable to summon.
