French television cancelled last night an interview with Mrs. Lina Heydrich, widow of farmer gestapo leader Reinhard Heydrich “in order not to provide a platform from which former Nazis or their relatives could try to whitewash their crimes.” The decision not to show the interview was reportedly taken after organizations of former resistance fighters and deportees lodged stiff protests with the TV authority.
Mrs. Heydrich, whose husband served as deputy SS commander to Heinrich Himmler and later as governor of Bohemia and Moravia, was interviewed as part of a study of West German reactions to the screening on West German television of the NBC-TV “Holocaust” series. Heydrich organized the mass extermination of European Jews in the opening years of World War II. He was killed by the Czechoslovak resistance in 1942.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.