Olga Gutmann Benário was born in
Munich 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 her activities with the group (including putting up posters) led local police to register her as a "communist agitator". At the age of 18 she moved with her lover and fellow party member
Otto Braun to Berlin where she continued her activities in the working class district of Neukoln. In this period she was arrested on charges of ‘preparations for high-treason’ Despite German authorities offering rewards of 10,000 marks for her arrest, "Many workers gave her a home and doors were made in different places so she could escape at anytime". 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 regime. 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
Barnimstrasse women's prison in Berlin, where on 27 November 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. Her arrest in Brazil and eventual extradition to Nazi Germany, where she would die in Ravensbrück concentration camp, was also made by possible by the collaboration of Britain's
MI6 with the Brazilian authorities. 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. ==Aftermath==