Olga Benario's father was the younger brother of Aron Benario, born in 1869. He was a socially committed lawyer in Munich, where Olga was born in 1908. Influenced by the family's social democratic environment, she joined a communist youth group. She followed a friend to Berlin, where she took part in the liberation of a comrade and was smuggled to Moscow via Czechoslovakia. In Moscow, Benario received military training. She learned weaponry and horse riding, and later also parachuting and flying.
At the end of 1934, Olga Benario was sent to Brazil together with Carlos Prestes on behalf of the Comintern to overthrow the autocratic government. The uprising failed. The revolutionaries were arrested unless they went into hiding. The Prestes-Benario couple also managed to do this until they were caught in 1936 and Olga, six months pregnant, was extradited to Germany. As a Jew and a communist, she was arrested by the Gestapo as soon as she arrived and taken to Barnimstraße prison, where her daughter Anita Leocadia was born. The girl was allowed to stay with her for 14 months until Olga's mother-in-law managed to get at least the child released.
Olga is taken to Lichtenburg concentration camp, then to Ravensbrück concentration camp. In February 1942, she was gassed in the psychiatric clinic in Bernburg.
Her daughter, Anita Benario-Prestes, is a professor in Rio de Janeiro. She visited Obernbreit in 2008 at the invitation of the Association for the Support and Promotion of the Former Synagogue.
