Berliner Kommunistische Jugend

Olga Benario was born in 1908 as the youngest child of a Jewish social-democratic lawyer family in Munich. At the age of 15, she joined the Communist Youth, and in 1925, she moved to Berlin with Otto Braun, where she worked for the KJVD in Berlin-Neukölln and for the KPD. Braun, accused of high treason, was freed from the Moabit court by Benario and comrades. They fled to Moscow, where she received military training, after which she worked as a Comintern agent. In 1936, she was arrested in Brazil with Luís Carlos Prestes and, despite being pregnant, was extradited to Nazi Germany. While in custody, her daughter Anita Leocádia Prestes was born, who was handed over to her grandmother after a worldwide campaign for her release in 1938. Olga Benario was murdered in 1942 at the Nazi killing center in Bernburg.

Anita Leocádia Prestes, born in 1936 in the women's prison on Barnimstrasse in Berlin, is the daughter of Olga Benario Prestes and the revolutionary Luís Carlos Prestes. At the age of 14 months, she was separated from her mother and handed over to her grandmother Leocádia Prestes. In Brazil, Anita Prestes studied chemistry. However, due to anti-communist persecution during the military dictatorship starting in 1964, she was unable to practice her profession. In the early 1970s, she went into exile in the Soviet Union, while in Brazil she was charged in absentia for her underground communist activities and sentenced to imprisonment. In 1975, she earned her doctorate in political economy in Moscow. Later, after an amnesty, she returned to Brazil. She is now a professor of Brazilian history at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and has published numerous books.