Benario, Olga (1908–1942)

German-Jewish Communist and revolutionary activist, who was committed to social justice and fought against the Nazis. Pronunciation: Beh-NAIR-ee-YO. Name variations: Olga Benario Prestes, Olga Benario-Prestes. Born Olga Benario in Munich, Germany, on February 12, 1908; gassed along with other German women political prisoners at Bernburg Hospital in early February 1942; daughter of Leo Benario (a wealthy Social Democratic attorney) and Eugenie Guttmann Benario (a socialite); received extensive leadership training ranging from Marxist theory to skydiving in USSR; married Luis Carlos Prestes (unofficially); children: one daughterAnita Leocádia Prestes (b. November 1936).

Joined the Young Communist League in Munich and became one of the most promising young women in the German Communist movement (1923); after engineering the rescue of Otto Braun in Berlin, fled with him to the Soviet Union (1928); traveled to France, Belgium, and England on Communist Youth International mission (1931); assigned by the Comintern to go to Brazil with Brazilian revolutionary leader Luis Carlos Prestes to lead a revolutionary upheaval which failed (November 1935); captured with Prestes by the fascist regime of Getulio Vargas and held until shipped, seven months pregnant, to Nazi Germany, where she gave birth to her daughter in prison (1936).

At the time of her murder in a Nazi concentration camp a few days short of her 34th birthday, Olga Benario had squeezed considerable exhilaration, joy, and suffering into her brief life. She had been born into the safe middle-class environment of a prosperous assimilated Jewish family during the final years of Europe's pre-1914 "golden age of security," but defiantly rejected the cultural and political norms of her family and class in favor of becoming a militant Communist revolutionary. While living and dying for a political ideology that would eventually be discredited, Benario demonstrated a passionate commitment to social justice.

Born on February 12, 1908, in the Bavarian city of Munich, Olga Benario was deeply influenced by her father Leo, a wealthy and successful lawyer who had a powerful sense of social justice and was a member of the moderate reformist Social Democratic Party. Leo Benario used his legal expertise to assist workers who wished to bring claims against their employers, and never turned down a case because the worker could not afford to pay. It was through him that Olga Benario first learned about the depths of social injustice. Reading her father's files, she was introduced to the inequities of a chaotic and unstable German social order in the years following World War I. Although Olga's political and social views became more radical than those of her father, she always recognized his essential decency and deep concern for the downtrodden.

Her relationship with her mother, on the other hand, was tense and one of increasingly mutual rejection. Eugenie Guttmann Benario was interested in little more than the elegant social events her husband's position made possible, and her superficial aspirations were regarded by her daughter as unacceptable in a time of social upheaval and vast suffering by the majority of Germany's people. Although the Benario family, who lived in an elegant home on the Karlplatz, was physically safe from the violence that raged in Munich in 1919 when a short-lived Soviet Republic ruled Bavaria, their young daughter was already determined to play a role in creating a better society than the one passed on to her.

Her hometown of Munich meanwhile became notorious as the center of a new radical-Rightist movement, the National Socialist German Workers Party led by an Austrian-born demagogue named Adolf Hitler. In the summer of 1923, a few months before Hitler made an unsuccessful bid to seize power (through a gangland-style event known as the Beer-Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923), Olga was only 15 when she joined an underground Communist youth squad in order to act against the growing danger of fascism. Headquartered in Munich's artists' colony of Schwabing, the group specialized in putting up illegal revolutionary posters around town, and its members were suspicious at first of the girl who had grown up, unlike them, in an atmosphere of affluence. But Benario soon proved to be fearless and resourceful. Quick-witted

on the street, where the police might show up at any instant, she also displayed extraordinary intellectual depth, having mastered many of the theoretical tomes of Marxism before she was out of her teens. Her presence gave the group new energy and goals.

In 1924, while working at a fashionable Munich bookshop, 18-year-old Olga Benario met the first great love of her life, Otto Braun (1901–1974). Seven years older, Braun already enjoyed a considerable reputation in Munich as a political radical and "lady's man." Olga expected him to be disheveled, bearded, and generally unkempt; instead, she was introduced to a handsome, vital 23-year-old Marxist activist, with hair parted meticulously and dressed in stylish creased trousers and brushed suede boots. While his most bohemian feature was probably his pipe, he had already chalked up impressive revolutionary credentials. Five years earlier, in the spring of 1919, Otto had still been in his teens when the fledgling Bavarian Communist Party relegated him the task of halting a convoy of German government troops moving toward Munich to crush the shaky Bavarian Soviet Republic that had just been proclaimed. Although superior force eventually crushed this Bolshevik experiment on German soil, Braun led the action that prolonged the life of the Munich Soviet for several additional weeks. His imprisonment for this action was the first of several political incarcerations, and, since those dramatic days, he had grown more skilled as a military theorist. By the time he met Benario, he was part of the secret apparatus of the German Communist Party (KPD) and was probably carrying out intelligence assignments for the Soviet authorities.

Soon lovers, Otto guided Olga's reading, acquainting her with the great works of military history and strategy. At party cell meetings, the stunningly beautiful young woman with the soft blue eyes now began to insist that her comrades also take up such works systematically, in preparation for the day when the fight to the death against fascism began.

Olga Benario eventually decided to move to Berlin, a metropolis with a large and militant Communist movement, and Braun convinced his superiors that he, too, could better serve KPD interests in the larger city. The couple rented a tiny room in the impoverished working-class district of Neukölln and carried out their clandestine party missions under the names issued on their false documents, as "Arthur Behrendt," a traveling merchant, and his wife, "Frieda Wolf Behrendt." The young lovers rarely had much time to themselves, as the party demanded their ever greater dedication to the task of preparing for the German working-class revolution. When they were together, Braun brought up the idea of marriage, but Benario rejected it. Fiercely opposed to the idea of becoming another person's property, she argued that their love was perfect as it was, and that the institution of marriage might destroy their relationship.

Early in 1926, Benario was barely 18 when she was made secretary of Agitation and Propaganda for the Communist Youth League of the city of Berlin. She spent her time organizing groups of young militants to hang posters, picket factories, and distribute pamphlets, and her strategies of protest were often ingenious. On one occasion, she organized dozens of couples to pose as lovers in the heart of Berlin, standing on street corners, window-shopping, and pausing outside bars and ice-cream parlors, until a loud whistle signaled for them to fill the street and chant as a group, while hammer-and-sickle banners and red flags were unfurled in the windows of adjacent shops and office buildings. By the time police arrived, a powerful demonstration of Communist protest had been mounted.

But such successes also made Benario a prime target for the Berlin political police. In early October 1926, she was arrested, at the same time Otto was arrested in another part of Berlin. Two months later, in early December, she was suddenly released from Moabit Prison, but Otto's release did not follow, and it became clear that the government planned a large-scale crack-down on the KPD. When state prosecutors prepared a charge against Braun of high treason, Benario began to organize for his rescue. Moabit Prison, where he was being held, was no ordinary jail, but a virtual fortress occupying an entire block in the heart of Berlin. In the early spring of 1928, when Otto's trial was imminent, it was decided that the rescue attempt would have to be made at one of his pre-trial hearings, during the few moments when he was being transferred from the waiting room to the main trial chamber.

On April 11, 1928, precisely at 9 am, an armed squad made up of Benario and five of her most trusted comrades burst into the room where Braun was about to be interrogated. Olga pressed a pistol into the neck of a guard and demanded release of the prisoner, and an instant later seven Communists were speeding away in a van toward the safety of "Red Neukölln." The Berlin press had a field day with headlines, and a profoundly embarrassed government quickly offered a reward of 5,000 Marks for information leading to the capture of Otto Braun, Olga Benario, and their co-conspirators. Their photographs were plastered everywhere and even shown in movie theaters before the film presentation, but proletarian solidarity held firm and the police received no significant leads. The long-range prospects for the couple to remain at large in Germany were dim, however, and in June 1928 they traveled secretly to the Soviet Union.

In Moscow, Benario took the code name "Olga Sinek" and began to work for the Communist Youth International (CYI), a branch of the Communist International (Comintern). After speaking to countless groups of workers and young people throughout the Soviet Union for some months, she was elected to the Central Committee of the CYI and became busier than ever, attending meetings as well as learning English, French, and Russian. Ever more militant in her Communist beliefs, she helped to create the organizational framework for a CYI military branch, and she pressured her superiors to send her to a Red Army camp near the Caspian Sea where she learned the fundamentals of light and heavy weapons. She also passed a basic equestrian course. As her paramilitary activities kept her away from Otto, and he grew increasingly possessive, their relationship began to deteriorate rapidly and ended in 1931. Late that year, Benario went to France, using the name "Eva Kruger," on an important CYI mission; Otto went to China, where he spent most of the decade of the 1930s involved in intelligence activities or acting as a military advisor to Mao Zedong during the legendary Long March of the Chinese Red Army when the Chinese Communist movement was in a critical phase of development.

In Paris, Olga Benario helped to mediate between feuding French Communist youth factions, while her revolutionary passions also drew her into various street demonstrations, leading to several arrests before she was finally deported to Belgium. Belgian Communists enabled her to travel to London, where she participated in the growing protests against unemployment and fascism, and was arrested by British authorities. Finally, she returned to Moscow and discovered that in her absence she had been elected to the presidium of the Communist Youth International. One offshoot of this promotion was her selection for training in piloting and parachuting at the Zhukovski Academy, and while attending this course she first heard from a fellow student about a remarkable military episode that had recently taken place in Brazil.

A full century after having freed itself from Portugal in the 1820s, Brazil remained a profoundly backward nation, with its economy controlled largely by foreign capital and the great majority of its people living in hopeless poverty under near-feudal conditions. Politics was a corrupt game played by a small and selfish elite, while middle-class intellectuals whiled away their days in cafés lamenting the lack of change. In 1924, this dispiriting picture had altered radically when a military revolt broke out against Brazil's inept, corrupt president. While most of the revolutionary forces were soon suppressed, a small unit had survived and was carrying on increasingly successful guerrilla activities in the almost impenetrable jungles of the Brazilian interior.

At the head of these forces was Luis Carlos Prestes, born into a wealthy family of high social standing with a long military tradition. Intelligent, handsome and an instinctive leader, Prestes had advanced rapidly in his chosen branch of army engineering. Although not a political sophisticate, he was a fierce nationalist and deeply resented Brazil's continual humiliation and exploitation by foreign economic interests, aided and abetted by a greedy and corrupt oligarchy of merchants and landowners. Through his charismatic leadership, he was able to commit his entire battalion to the mutiny in July 1924, and for three years afterward his "Prestes Column" survived in the brutal and merciless jungle and avoided capture by government forces. In March 1927, when the last unit of Prestes' forces surrendered their weapons to Bolivian authorities, their epic long march had covered the incredible distance of almost 25,000 miles on foot. Prestes had escaped to Bolivia and spent the next few years wandering in Latin America. He remained a strong nationalist, and while his program called for major social reforms in Brazil, he was not a Marxist, or even a Socialist in any but the vaguest of terms.

In 1930, Prestes first met with Arthur Ewert (1890–1959), a German-born Comintern representative who had been active in Communist Party affairs in Germany, Great Britain, Canada, the U.S., China and various parts of Latin America. Ewert made an intriguing offer to Prestes: come to the Soviet Union and witness the building of a new Socialist society. When and if he was sufficiently impressed by what he saw, Prestes could then work with the Soviets to help bring about a Communist revolution in Brazil. Prestes accepted Ewert's offer and arrived in Moscow in November 1931, bringing along members of his family: his mother Leocádia , and his four unmarried sisters, Clotilde, Heloísa, Lúcia , and Lígia .

Picking up the optimistic spirit of the first of many Soviet Five Year Plans, Prestes took a job as an engineer for the Central Inspectorate of Civil Construction. Leocádia struggled with the task of keeping herself and her daughters alive, since Luis had refused the special privileges offered to him as a visiting technician, preferring that he and his family accept the same difficult standard of life as the average Soviet family. The extreme cold of the Russian winter was a great trial for the five Prestes women, but through luck and discovered skills they survived and learned to respect the ordinary people of a country that seemed to have little else but immense suffering as the core of its historical experience.

Prestes first heard about "Olga Sinek" from Elena Stasova , a revered Old Bolshevik and associate of Lenin, who told him about a young German woman who was making meteoric progress as a leader of the Communist Youth International. The two did not meet until November 1934, when Benario was assigned to Prestes as his bodyguard. That summer the die had been cast, when the Comintern secretary, Dmitri Manuilski, decided that Brazil was ripe for revolution and assigned several of his best agents, including Luis Carlos Prestes, Olga Benario, Elise Ewert and her husband Arthur, to launch an upheaval in that strategically vital nation. On December 29, 1934, Luis and Olga departed from Moscow for Paris, their mission to travel to Brazil as a middle-class married couple via an indirect route (avoiding Germany, where Benario was well-known to the Gestapo). Prestes' assumed identity was "Pedro Fernandez," a Spaniard, while Olga remained Olga Sinek, a Soviet citizen. Concerned about the poor quality of their false passports, Benario and Prestes went first to Brussels where they felt threatened by police agents. Eventually an official at the Portuguese consulate in Rouen, France, who held liberal opinions even though his government was reactionary, helped them to attain genuine new passports which presented them as António and Maria Bergner Vilar, a wealthy couple from Lisbon. By this time Prestes had fallen deeply in love with Olga. Although they were never to legally wed, she fully reciprocated his love, and the couple lived as man and wife and honeymooned happily in New York, where their passports picked up an additional patina of authenticity in the form of valid U.S. entry and exit visa stamps.

By mid-April 1935, Prestes and Benario had arrived in Brazil, and flew in a four-engine hydroplane to the city of Florianópolis, where the pilot of their postal airliner made an unauthorized landing to let them off, on the excuse that it would facilitate Olga's reaching her relatives in the state of northern Paraná. The airport had no customs officials, and from there they went by taxi to Curitiba, and then on to Sao Paulo. From Sao Paulo, they traveled to Rio de Janeiro and rented a house not far from the exclusive Ipanema beach district where the Ewerts were already located. Along with the Ewerts, whose false names were "Harry Berger" and "Machla Lenczycki," the team included Victor Allen Barron, an American Communist well-versed in radio transmission, several veteran Brazilian Communists, the journalist Astrojildo Pereira, the pharmacist Otávio Brandao, and Rodolfo Ghioldi, an Argentine Communist leader who was a member of the Comintern's executive committee.

In 1935, Brazil was ruled by Getulio Vargas, who had seized power in 1930 and instituted a number of genuine reforms, but was now moving rapidly toward a permanent form of dictatorship at least superficially resembling the European fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. One ominous aspect of the Vargas dictatorship was its increasing reliance on a secret political police, led by the police chief of Rio de Janeiro, Filinto Müller, a lawyer and army captain whose top officials were often of German ancestry. Müller was ruthless in his war against "unBrazilian activities" and tireless in enhancing the effectiveness of his repressive machinery. Some of his animosity toward Luis Carlos Prestes may have been due to the fact that he had served briefly in the Prestes Column, had deserted with a substantial portion of its funds, and had been publicly denounced by Prestes as a coward and deserter. Müller customarily shared ideas and data with Gestapo officials resident in Brazil as part of a joint struggle against "Jewish-Bolshevik subversion."

Despite the combination of populist demagoguery by Vargas and harsh repression by Müller, a grassroots democratic movement was alive and growing in Brazil in the mid-1930s. Much of the effort for profound social reforms centered in the National Liberation Alliance (ANL), a coalition of various groups ranging from Communists to liberals and socially conscious Catholics that was compatible with the anti-fascist Popular Front ideology then espoused by the Comintern. Founded in March 1935 as the first significant political movement to emerge in Brazil since the revolution of 1930, the ANL had a broad popular agenda and clearly posed a threat to Vargas and his allies. The president, frightened by its democratic potential, banned it on June 11, 1935. Liberals and moderates then abandoned the ANL, which went underground and became almost exclusively led by the Communists. During this period, Prestes, Benario, the Ewerts and their group met often to discuss strategy. Olga and Elise Ewert, codenamed "Sabo," strolled on nearby Ipanema beach and attended theaters and cinemas. Luis was more cautious and, on one occasion, was almost recognized by a former comrade of the Prestes Column now reinstated in the army. Whenever Luis went out, he was accompanied by Olga, who carried an automatic weapon. While the revolutionaries took precautions in Rio de Janeiro to avoid being snared by Müller's agents, Moscow apparently preferred to taunt the Vargas regime. The August 25, 1935, issue of Pravda announced that Prestes had been elected a full member of the executive committee of the Comintern, and while the newspaper mentioned that Prestes was in Moscow, the announcement doubtless served as a red flag, heightening desire of the Brazilian regime to snare the revolutionary if he should be found on his native soil.

In late November 1935, a series of spontaneous military revolts in the cities of Natal and Recife attempted to spark a national revolution aimed at toppling Vargas and installing a government based on the ANL reform agenda. Both insurrections were poorly led and bloodily suppressed, shattering the ANL and creating a crisis in Rio for the Ewert-Prestes group. One last hope remained for a successful revolutionary spark: the cadets of the Army Aviation School in Rio de Janeiro. Relying on his near-mythical reputation as the Brazilian people's "Cavalier of Hope," Prestes had made secret appeals and won over virtually all of these young and impressionable apprentice aviators, many of whom were like himself, from wealthy and socially prominent families. But on November 26, 1935, Prestes' call for the cadets to revolt was heeded by only a handful, and, after 11 hours of bloody fighting and heavy losses among the youths, this revolt was also snuffed out. Vargas could now brand all attempts at social change in Brazil the work of "Bolsheviks," foreign-born or foreign-trained, and on December 20, 1935, few Brazilians protested when he proclaimed a state of martial law.

Police and secret agents swarmed throughout Rio and its suburbs, and Prestes now knew that Müller and his agents would never rest until he and Benario were captured. On December 26, 1935, time ran out for the Ewerts. Olga was on her way to their home with some of Prestes' notes on the political situation, when she turned the corner in time to witness Arthur Ewert being shoved into a van and Elise being dragged off to another vehicle. Realizing that Prestes was in great danger, Olga returned home and fled with him from their house just before police arrived and ransacked it for documents.

The couple found temporary refuge in the city's Copacabana area, while the Ewerts were subjected to tortures by Brazilian and German Nazi police interrogators on loan to Müller's staff. Elise Ewert was raped by dozens of soldiers while her husband was forced to watch, then was placed in a coffin and spuriously buried alive, but neither revealed anything to the police. When police chief Müller held press conferences to announce what had been discovered about the activities of Arthur and Elise Ewert, the information actually came from detailed intelligence reports supplied to Müller by the Gestapo, British Intelligence, and the U.S. State Department, all of whom supported the implacable crusade of the Vargas regime against Brazilian revolutionary elements.

Olga and Luis managed to rent a modest house in the Meyer section of Rio, where they lived for several months while preparing for an eventual escape. In this time, several more members of their group were captured and tortured, including the radio operator Victor Barron, whose "suicide" occurred under suspicious circumstances. Rodolfo Ghioldi was arrested and only "moderately" mistreated, but cracked under the pressure and revealed the fact, unknown to the police, that Prestes was in Brazil with a foreign-born wife named Olga. In the pre-dawn hours of March 5, 1936, in torrential rain, their house was surrounded by fifty soldiers and three police. When they broke in, Benario pushed in front of Prestes, shouting "Don't shoot, he's unarmed!" an instinctive gesture that may have saved him from gunfire. At police headquarters, he was ushered into a tiny elevator, and as the gate slammed shut, the two looked at each other for the last time.

Although Olga attempted to maintain her identity as Maria Bergner Vilar, the fiction evaporated when a detailed letter from the Brazilian ambassador in Berlin, who was on the friendliest possible terms with the German Gestapo, provided Müller with a detailed biography of the mystery woman revealed to be "Olga Benario, … an Israelite [and] … Communist agent of the Third International known for her great intelligence and courage." In prison, Olga soon joined her fellow inmates in the singing of revolutionary songs to maintain group morale. Many of her fellow prisoners were women who had hoped to create a political and social democracy in Brazil through the ALN program. One of Olga's most important accomplishments was the calming effect she had on Elise, whose mental balance had been seriously weakened by her time under torture, and whose husband Arthur had literally lost his mind.

Hoping that she might be imprisoned in Brazil or even deported to a non-fascist nation, Benario, who was pregnant, found her worst fear realized in September 1936, when she and Elise Ewert were deported to Nazi Germany. Many contemporary observers regarded the deportation of Benario as President Vargas' "gift to Hitler" and most saw it for what it was: a death sentence. Luis Prestes, too popular in his country to be martyred, received a sentence of 30 years imprisonment.

On November 27, 1936, one year to the day after the collapse of the frustrated Brazilian revolution, Benario's child was born in the Berlin Women's Prison, a girl named Anita Leocádia Prestes after Anita Garibaldi , wife of the great Italian liberator. The new mother was informed by the prison matron that she could keep her infant as long as she was able to breastfeed. Radicals and liberals, outraged by this circumstance, attempted a worldwide campaign to free mother and daughter. Particularly vocal was the proud new grandmother, Leocádia, who traveled to Europe to mobilize public opinion on behalf of Olga and Anita. But the Nazis were determined to destroy the Communist Jew and separated her from her daughter on January 21, 1938. In a letter to Luis, she revealed this, along with the day of their capture, as among the darkest days of her life.

The infant Anita eventually reached the arms of Leocádia. Olga and Elise were meanwhile transported to the infamous Ravensbrück concentration camp, where Ewert, broken in body and spirit, died in the autumn of 1939. At Ravensbrück, Olga Benario would continue to display courage, maintaining the spirit of defiance that kept her, and many of her compatriots, within the circle of humanity despite countless attempts by her captors to strip her of every vestige of dignity.

In February 1942, sensing the end was near, Olga Benario penned a farewell letter to her family, on the eve of her transport to Bernburg Hospital, where she died, gassed by the SS, with a group of anti-fascist activist women. Luis was released from prison in 1945, when he learned about Olga's death at the hands of the Nazis. A genuine rebel to the end, he broke with the Brazilian Communist Party in the 1980s and lived in Rio de Janeiro until his death in March 1990. Leocádia died in 1943, having rescued her granddaughter who lived to become a university professor in Rio. Arthur Ewert, released from prison in 1947 and sent to East Germany, died in 1959 without regaining his sanity.

The life of Olga Benario, and its passionate commitment to social justice is meanwhile honored in the streets named after her in seven cities of the former German Democratic Republic, as well as 91 schools, factories and workers' brigades found in the same formerly Communist state. In Riberao Preto, a city in Brazil, a street bears her name.

sources:

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Braun, Otto. A Comintern Agent in China 1932–39. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.

Dulles, John W.F. Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900–1935. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973.

——. Brazilian Communism, 1935–1945: Repression during World Upheaval. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

Hermlin, Stephan. Die erste Reihe. Dortmund, 1975.

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John Haag , Associate Professor, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia