In 1923, aged fifteen, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 helped organize her lover and fellow party member Otto Braun's escape from Moabit prison.

[3] She went to Czechoslovakia and from there, reunited with Braun, to Moscow, where Benário attended the Lenin-School of the Comintern and then worked as an instructor of the Communist Youth International, in the Soviet Union and in France and Great Britain, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities.

[11] The plea, however, was speedily quashed, the rapporteur-justice alleging that habeas corpus was superseded by martial law[12] and that Olga's deportation was justified as "an alien noxious to public order".

[16] This move was in line with Popular Front Communist policies of the time:[17] Prestes argued that, by declaring himself against Vargas' immediate resignation, he wanted to avoid a "redemptory coup" as well as to take a stand against "the decrepit remains of reaction".

[19] In the postwar German Democratic Republic, Benário was presented as the model of the female revolutionary, and the writer Anna Seghers wrote a biographical sketch about her for International Women's Day in 1951.

[21] Benário was the subject of an opera Entre la Piel y el Alma by G. P. Cribari, which premiered in Glasgow at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama on 22 May 1992.

[23] Also in 2004 she was the subject of a German documentary (with reconstructed scenes) directed by the former assistant to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Galip Iyitanir, Olga Benário - Ein Leben für die Revolution.