Olga Benário Prestes
| Olga Benário Prestes | |
|---|---|
Olga Benário in 1928
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| Born |
Olga Gutmann Benário February 12, 1908 Munich, German Empire |
| Died | April 23, 1942 (aged 34) Bernburg, Nazi Germany |
| Spouse(s) | Luís Carlos Prestes |
| Children | Anita |
Olga Benário Prestes (February 12, 1908 – April 23, 1942) was a German Brazilian communist militant.
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.
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