page_title: Olga Benário Prestes
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Olga Benário Prestes / Biography
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. ADN-ZB/IML-ZPA, 19.2.1975 Olga Benario-Prestes Antifaschistin geb. 12.2.1908 München April 1942 in Bernburg ermordet, emigrierte 1933 in die Sowjetunion; 1935 folgte sie dem brasilianischen KP-Führer Luis Carlos Prestes in dessen Heimat. Von Brasilien wurde sie im Frühjahr 1936 an die Gestapo ausgeliefert. Im November 1936 gebar sie im Berliner Frauengefängnis eine Tochter, die auf Grund internationaler Proteste an die Mutter von L.C. Prestes übergeben werden mußte. Olga Benario-Prestes wurde in das KZ-Ravensbrück verschleppt und in Bernburg vergast. Während ihrer Verhaftung in Brasilien
context_page_description: Olga Benário Prestes was a German communist militant gassed by Nazi Germany.
context_section_description: 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 so-called “anti-fascist activities” (Soviet covert action, as France and Great Britain were parliamentary democracies). 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, leading some historians to view her as an agent of Soviet military intelligence. Due to her military training, in 1934 she was given the task of 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 eventually led to the institution of the fascist-like Estado Novo régime.
  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 Federal Court 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". 
  After the Brazilian supreme court's decision, and despite an international campaign, Olga was forcibly returned to Germany in September 1936. The captain of the German liner that took her cancelled scheduled stops in non-German European ports, foiling communist attempts at rescuing her. On arrival, she was put in prison in Berlin, where on November 27 she gave birth to a daughter, Anita Leocádia. At the age of fourteen months, the child was released into the care of her paternal grandmother, Leocádia Prestes. 
  After the birth of her child, Olga was sent to Lichtenburg concentration camp in 1938, transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1939, and finally to Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in 1942, where she was gassed alongside hundreds of other female political prisoners.
caption: Olga Benário Prestes during her imprisonment in Brazil in 1936. She was shortly afterwards deported to Germany and murdered by the Nazis in Bernburg Euthanasia Centre
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