Olga Benário Prestes

Life

Olga was born in Munich as Olga Gutmann Benário, to a Jewish family. Her father, Leo Benário, was a Social-Democrat lawyer, and her mother, Eugenie (Gutmann), was a member of Bavarian high-society. In 1923, aged fifteen, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 helped organize her lover and comrade Otto Braun's escape from Moabit prison. She went to Czechoslovakia and from there, reunited with Braun, to Moscow, where Benário attended the Lenin-School of the Comintern and then worked as an instructor of the Communist Youth International, in the Soviet Union and in France and Great Britain, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities. She parted from Otto Braun in 1931.

After her stay in Britain, where she was briefly arrested, Olga attended a course in the Zhukovsky Military Academy, something that led her to be charged in rightist histories with being an agent of Soviet military intelligence. Be that as it may, due to her military training, in 1934 she was tasked with helping the return to Brazil of Luís Carlos Prestes, to whom she was assigned as a bodyguard. In order to accomplish this mission, false papers were created stating that they were a Portuguese married couple. By the time they arrived at Rio de Janeiro in 1935, this cover had become a reality, as the couple had fallen in love. After a failed insurrection in November 1935, Benário and her husband went into hiding, and after barely escaping a police raid at Ipanema, they were both eventually arrested in January 1936, during the harsh anti-communist campaign declared after Getúlio Vargas had proclaimed martial law and was already plotting the 1937 coup that would eventually lead to the institution of the fascist-like Estado Novo régime.

Capture by Gestapo

Pregnant and separated from Prestes, Benário clung to her alias, only to have her real identity disclosed by Brazilian diplomats, working hand-in-hand with the Gestapo. Her lawyers attempted to avoid extradition by means of a habeas corpus at the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal), based on her pregnancy, because extradition would have left a newborn Brazilian national in the power of a foreign government. As Brazilian law forbids the extradition of nationals, Olga's lawyers expected to win time until Olga gave birth on Brazilian soil to an ipso facto Brazilian citizen - irrespective of the child's paternity, which remained legally doubtful in the absence of evidence for Olga's and Prestes' marriage - something that would have rendered extradition quite unlikely. The plea, however, was speedily quashed, the rapporteur-justice alleging that habeas corpus was superseded by martial law and that Olga's deportation was justified as "an alien noxious to public order". She was then, despite an international campaign, taken back to Germany in September 1936, the captain of the German liner that took her having cancelled scheduled stops in non-German European ports, therefore foiling communist attempts at rescuing her. On arrival, she was put in prison, where she gave birth to a daughter, Anita Leocádia. The child was subsequently released into the care of her grandmother, Leocádia Prestes.

Execution at Ravensbruck

Olga was eventually sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and from there to Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in 1942, where she was gassed.

As Vargas joined the United Nations and Brazil entered World War II against the Axis, Luís Carlos Prestes, the father of Anita Leocádia and former partner of Olga Benário, eventually struck a political partnership with him in order to avoid Vargas' immediate ousting in 1945, which was demanded both by his more rightist domestic opponents and by Adolf Berle as US ambassador. This move was in line with Popular Front Communist policies of the time: Prestes argued that, by declaring himself against Vargas' immediate resignation, he wanted to avoid a "redemptory coup" as well as to take a stand against "the decrepit remains of reaction".

Legacy

Jorge Amado, in his 1942 biographical novel "Vida de Luis Carlos Prestes", compared Olga Benario with Ana Ribeiro da Silva, the Brazilian wife of Garibaldi - and remarked that "in the person of Olga, Europe repaid the debt to Latin America" (i.e., in her case it was a European woman revolutionary who married a Latin American revolutionary leader).

In the postwar German Democratic Republic, Olga was presented as the model of the female revolutionary, and the writer Anna Seghers wrote a biographical sketch about her for International Women's Day in 1951.

Olga Benário was the subject of an opera Entre la Piel y el Alma by G. P. Cribari, which premiered in Glasgow at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama on May 22, 1992.

In the GDR Ruth Werner published a successful biographical novel for young readers about Olga Benario in 1961.

In 2004, a popular Brazilian film based on Benário's life, Olga, directed by telenovela director Jayme Monjardim, which offered a thoroughly depoliticized account of Olga's life, centered on her love affair with Prestes, was released, to the disappointment of German critics, who called it "kitsch advertising".

Also in 2004 she was the subject of a German documentary (with reconstructed scenes) directed by the former assistant to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Galip Iyitanir, Olga Benário - Ein Leben für die Revolution.

In 2006, the opera Olga, by Jorge Antunes, premiered on October 14 at the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo, Brazil.

In 2009 Olga Benario was one of three female protagonists in Swiss writer Robert Cohen's vast novel about the anti-fascist exile Exil der frechen Frauen.

In January 2013, the English translation of the play Olga's Room by German playwright Dea Loher, was presented by the Speaking in Tongues Theatre Company at the Arcola Theatre in London.

In 2013 Robert Cohen edited the exchange of letters from prisons and concentration camps between Olga Benario and Luiz Carlos Prestes.