Trivia

Daughter of Leocádia Prestes and lawyer Leo Benario.

Mother of Anita Leocádia Prestes (b. November 27th 1936 in Berlin).

In 1923, aged fifteen, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 helped organize her lover and fellow party member 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.

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.

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

Due to her military training, in 1934 she was given the task of helping the return to Brazil of Luis 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.

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 Luis Carlos Prestes, was released, to the disappointment of German critics, who called it "kitsch advertising".

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.

She was a German-Brazilian communist militant.

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.