Olga Benario-Prestes

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Olga Benario-Prestes (1928)
Olga Benario-Prestes (last row) with a group from the KJVD (1926/27), photo from the Federal Archives
Olga Benario-Prestes during her arrest in Brazil (1936)
Letter to Luis Carlos Prestes dated September 15, 1938, from the Central Party Archives of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED
Special stamp of the GDR , 1959
Stolperstein , Innstrasse 24, in Berlin-Neukölln

Olga Benario (born February 12, 1908 in Munich ; † April 23, 1942 in the "euthanasia" institution in Bernburg ) was a German communist and a victim of National Socialism .

Surname

Benario-Prestes has established itself as a name form, although her marriage in Moscow to the Brazilian Luís Carlos Prestes is doubtful ( see above : Morais, 1989). Her single name under Brazilian law, Olga Gutmann Benário, became Olga Benário Prestes through her alleged Moscow marriage. Only the hyphen is a German addition.

Life

Weimar Republic

Olga Benario was the youngest child of a Jewish family of lawyers. Her brother Otto Benario was seven years older. Her father, Leo Benario, was a well-known social democratic lawyer with a law firm in Munich who also supported the poor in legal disputes. The mother Eugenie Benario, née Guttmann, came from the wealthy Munich Jewish society.

Since Olga Benario was politically and socially very interested, her father gave her legal files to read about convicted leftists. This laid the foundation for their political worldview. Olga Benario attended the Luisengymnasium in Munich and began training as a bookseller with the publisher and friend of the Georg Müller family , which she dropped out after two years. Olga Benario was a member of the communist youth group in Schwabing. In 1925 she followed her future partner Otto Braun from Munich to Berlin , where she worked for the KJVD in Berlin-Neukölln and for the KPD . She was a typist in the Soviet trade mission. When she and Braun were arrested for high treason, their father obtained his daughter's release.

Braun was accused of high treason and espionage by attorney Paul Vogt and imprisoned. According to KPD information, Olga Benario led his armed liberation campaign organized by the KPD intelligence service. In fact, on April 11, 1928 around 8:50 a.m., a group of seven KJVD comrades from Berlin-Neukölln of the KPD's M apparatus , led by Hermann Dünow , used an appointment from Benario to free Braun from the Moabit Criminal Court . Benario was smuggled into Czechoslovakia with the help of the secret apparatus of the KPD . From there she got to Moscow with Otto Braun .

Soviet Union

In Moscow, Benario received military training. She learned weapons and horse riding, later also skydiving and flying. In 1931 she separated from Otto Braun and traveled to Paris on a mission as "Eva Krüger". Arrested and released, she went via Belgium to England, where she was arrested again. The MI5 transmitted her fingerprints to the Munich police, which verified her identity by means of a comparison.

Brazil

At the end of 1934, Olga Benario was introduced to the Brazilian captain Luiz Carlos Prestes in Moscow . In the mid-1920s, he led the Coluna Prestes , a sub-movement of Tenentismo , a rebellion of young officers in the Brazilian military against the ruling oligarchy and the then government of Bernardes. The aim of these rebellions was a structural reform of the country. After these reform efforts failed, Prestes lived in exile in Moscow from the early 1930s.

On behalf of the Comintern , Benario was sent to Brazil as Prestes' bodyguard, where Prestes was to lead a preparatory uprising of the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL) against the autocratic government of Getúlio Vargas . On the trip, they disguised themselves as a "Portuguese couple on their honeymoon". As a result, the relationship turned into a deep love. In Rio de Janeiro she met Elisabeth "Sabo" Saborowski and her husband Arthur Ewert , a former member of the Reichstag, as well as other professional revolutionaries who had traveled from the Soviet Union.

The uprising of November 27, 1935 failed because popular support was overestimated and government troops were informed, apparently through treason. Benario and Prestes went into hiding and a wave of persecution against the left began; there were numerous deaths and thousands were imprisoned. Elza Fernandes (1915–1936), the wife of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Brazil , Antonio Maciel Bonfim , was suspected of being a traitor because she was arrested and released several times, and each time someone was arrested. The communists decided, with the consent of Prestes, to eliminate the “traitor” and murdered her through strangulation.

After the Ewert couple, Prestes and Benario were arrested in the spring of 1936. In the fall, the pregnant Olga Benario and the German co-conspirator Sabo Saborowski were extradited to Germany on instructions from Vargas. The two women were brought to the German ship La Coruña for extradition on September 21, 1936 by Filinto Müller , police chief of Rio de Janeiro . This contradicted Brazilian law that a woman who was expecting a child from a Brazilian could not be expelled.

time of the nationalsocialism

She gave birth to her daughter Anita Leocádia Prestes on November 27, 1936 in the Barnimstrasse women's prison in Berlin . The child stayed with the mother until January 1938. Since Luís Carlos Prestes declared paternity, the Gestapo gave the daughter to the grandmother Leocadia Prestes in 1938.

Olga Benario was transferred to the Lichtenburg concentration camp in February 1938 , where she saw Elisabeth Saborowski-Ewert again. In 1939 she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , where the prisoner camp administration appointed her block elder in the Jewish block. Prestes' mother obtained papers for Benario to leave for Mexico, but these could no longer be delivered from London because the war had started and were sent back.

In 1942 Benario was gassed together with other inmates of the Ravensbrück concentration camp as part of " Aktion 14f13 " in the Bernburg killing center . Her father died in 1933, her mother died in 1943 in Theresienstadt concentration camp . The Gestapo forged the death certificate and claimed that she died of congestive heart failure and peritonitis. Her brother Otto Benario was murdered on September 28, 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp .

additional

Sculpture carrying woman by Will Lammert in Ravensbrück, with Olga Benario as a model

The Gestapo was informed about the work and stays of Olga Benario and about her personal and party relations with various functionaries by consistent detailed reports dating back to 1933 from several informants of communist origin.

It is doubtful whether Olga Benario, as she always claimed to the Gestapo, was married to Luis Carlos Prestes. According to the Gestapo documents from Moscow archives published in 2016 in a literary adaptation by Robert Cohen , neither Benario, Prestes or any official bodies in Moscow, Paris or Brazil were able to produce the relevant documents. The marriage was probably only claimed to prevent deportation from Brazil and later to enable at least the daughter Anita to be handed over to Prestes' mother.

The daughter Anita Leocádia Prestes , a historian, lives in Brazil.

Honors

In the GDR, schools, kindergartens and streets were named after Olga Benario. Together with Hilde Coppi and Liselotte Herrmann , she was a symbol for mothers murdered by the Nazis who gave birth to their children in the Barnimstrasse women's prison .

The Olga Benario gallery and a stumbling stone in front of her house at Innstrasse are reminiscent of Olga Benario . 24 / corner of Donaustraße in Berlin-Neukölln , the youth film club Olga Benario in Frankfurt (Oder) , a youth hostel in Graefenroda (Thuringia), a senior citizen facility in Schwedt , a daycare center in Sellin on Rügen and streets in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg , Jena and others Bernburg (Saale) . In February 2019, the left center Barrio Olga Benario opened in her hometown of Munich . Olga Benario was inspired by Will Lammert's sculpture Carrying on the grounds of the Ravensbrück Memorial .

media

  • The 2004 documentary Olga Benario - A Life for the Revolution by Galip İyitanır , Benario was portrayed in the scenes by Margrit Sartorius .
  • Also in 2004, the feature film Olga, based on the biography of Fernando Morais, was released in cinemas. Directed by Jayme Monjardim, Camila Morgado played the title role. A huge hit with audiences in Brazil, the film was panned by critics as too cheesy and too reduced to a love story. From August 31, 2006, the film was also shown in German cinemas in a heavily abridged form.
  • There is also a dance piece about her by Catharina Gadelhas , which bears the title Olga .
  • The Bayerische Rundfunk shone on 7 July 2007, the mission I have been fighting for the right thing, the good, the best. The revolutionary life of Olga Benario from Monika Meister.
  • On October 14, 2006, the opera Olga by the Brazilian composer Jorge Antunes with libretto in Portuguese by Gerson Valle was premiered at the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo . The original opera was finished in 1997, but for political reasons no theater was willing to perform it.
  • A dramatization for the spoken theater by Damaris Nübel under the title Auf Olga Benario! was premiered on November 13, 2008 in the Munich Schauburg . The piece reconstructs Benario's life from the perspective of her daughter Anita, her father Luís Carlos Prestes and his mother.
  • In the novel, exile Naughty Women of Robert Cohen (s. Literature) Olga Benario is one of the three main characters.

literature

  • Robert Cohen : The Benario Process. The Gestapo files 1936-1942 . edition berolina, Berlin 2016. ISBN 978-3-95841-041-1 .
  • Olga Benario, Luiz Carlos Prestes: The Indomitable. Correspondence from prison and concentration camp . Edited by Robert Cohen. Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1327-9 .
  • Robert Cohen: Exile of Naughty Women. Rotbuch, Berlin 2009. 3rd edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-86789-057-1 .
  • Fernando Morais: Olga. Volksblatt, 1989, ISBN 3-923243-50-2 . New edition: Rowohlt, 1992, ISBN 3-499-13030-0 .
  • William Waack: The Forgotten Revolution - Olga Benario and the German Revolt in Rio. Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-7466-8013-1 .
  • Ruth Werner : Olga Benario - the story of a brave life. New life, Berlin 1961.
    • New edition: Olga Benario - A life for the revolution , Zambon-Verlag, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 978-3-88975-158-4 .
  • Federal Archives Berlin ZC 14103 A. 18.
  • Bernd Kaufmann u. a .: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937. Dietz, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-320-01817-5 .
  • Michaela Karl : Olga Benario: The revolutionary. In: Bavarian Amazons - 12 portraits. Pustet, Regensburg 2004, ISBN 3-7917-1868-1 , pp. 209-226.
  • Stephan Hermlin : The first row. Neues Leben, Berlin 1951, 5th edition 1985, p. 64 ff.
  • Anna Seghers : Olga Benario-Prestes [1951]. In: Seghers: About artwork and reality . Vol. III. Published by the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Edited and introduced by Sigrid Bock. Berlin 1971, pp. 158-61.
  • Luise Kraushaar u. a .: German resistance fighters 1933–1945. Biographies and letters. Volume 1. Dietz, Berlin 1970, pp. 105-108.
  • Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( bundesstiftung-aufverarbeitung.de ).

Web links

Commons : Olga Benario-Prestes  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Anna-Jutta Pietsch: Jakob-Klar-Straße 1 - Olga Benario's parents' house . In: Ilse Macek (Hrsg.): Excluded, disenfranchised, deported: Schwabing and Schwabinger fates: 1933 to 1945 . Volk Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-937200-43-9 , pp. 309-312 .
  2. ↑ Bernd Kaufmann: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 . Dietz, Berlin 1993, p. 162.
  3. ↑ Cf. Olga Benario, Luiz Carlos Prestes: The Unyielding. Correspondence from prison and concentration camp . Edited by Robert Cohen. Wallstein, Göttingen 2013.
  4. ↑ Erika Runge : Resist defenselessness (conversation with Doris Maase ). In: Kürbiskern , Heft 4, 1975, p. 147.
  5. ↑ Memorial book of the Federal Archives for the victims of the National Socialist persecution of Jews in Germany (1933–1945). Federal Archives
  6. ↑ File No. 166. Documents from the Gestapo [“O. Benario "] * Excerpt from the tab on the communist, .. . germandocsinrussia.org. P. 56. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  7. ↑ File No. 166. Documents from the Gestapo [“O. Benario "] * Excerpt from the tab on the communist, .. . germandocsinrussia.org. P. 55. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
  8. ↑ Memorial book of the Federal Archives for the victims of the National Socialist persecution of Jews in Germany (1933–1945). Federal Archives
  9. ^ Robert Cohen: The Benario process. edition berolina, Berlin 2016.
  10. ↑ about Olga Benario Gallery Olga Benario
  11. ↑ Barrio Olga Benario - New room for solidarity and resistance in Munich. Accessed December 11, 2019 (German).
  12. ↑ Olga ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on Kinomorgen.de
  13. ↑ Nicole Strecker: Upright to the last moment . ( Memento of August 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: Kölnische Rundschau , October 16, 2001
personal data
SURNAME Benario-Prestes, Olga
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Benario, Olga
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Brazilian resistance fighter in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1942
Place of death Bernburg killing center