Olga Benario

Olga Benario: a virtual unknown in West Germany, on the other side of the Wall, there were schools, kindergartens and streets named after her. Born into a Jewish family in Munich in 1908, she became involved with the Young Communist League in Berlin-Neukölln in the 1920s. In 1928, she fled to the Soviet Union and was trained as a Comintern agent, before being sent to Paris and London in the service of the party, and finally to Rio de Janeiro. After a failed uprising, Brazil extradited Benario to Nazi Germany, where she was murdered in 1942.

Historian Christopher Kopper recounts the life story of this remarkable woman for the first time in a scholarly biography drawing on newly unearthed material. The outcome is a fascinating portrait of a courageous woman who was held back by no boundaries and only ever had one goal in mind: world revolution.