On October 15, 1917, exotic dancer Mata Hari was executed by
a French firing squad for the crime of espionage. She was born Margueretha
Gertruida Zelle in a small town in northern Holland and formerly married to a
captain in the Dutch army; Mata Hari had performed in Paris as a dancer since
1903. She adopted an elaborate stage persona, claiming she was born in a sacred
Indian temple and taught ancient Indian dances by a priestess who gave her the
name Mata Hari, which meant "eye of the dawn." Her exotic dances soon
earned her fans all over Europe, where she packed dance halls, largely because
of her willingness to dance almost entirely naked in public.
A courtesan as well as a dancer, Mata Hari amassed an
impressive catalog of lovers, including high-ranking military officers and
political figures from both France and Germany. With the outbreak of World War
I, these relationships immediately made her suspicious to French intelligence,
which reportedly put her under surveillance. The circumstances of her alleged
spying activities during the war were and remain unclear: It was said that,
while in the Netherlands in 1916, she was offered cash by a German consul to
report back information obtained on her next visit to France. When British
intelligence discovered details of this arrangement, they passed them on to
their counterparts in France; Mata Hari was arrested in Paris in February 1917.
Under interrogation by French military intelligence, Mata
Hari herself admitted that she had passed outdated information to a German
intelligence officer, yet she claimed that she had also been paid to act as a
French spy in Belgium (then occupied by the Germans) though she had not
informed the French of her prior dealings with the German consul. She was
apparently acting as a double agent, though the Germans had apparently written
her off as being ineffective. She was tried in a military court and sentenced
to death. The trial was riddled with bias and circumstantial evidence, and many
believed that the French authorities, as well as the press, trumped her up as
"the greatest woman spy of the century" to distract the public from
the huge losses the French army was suffering on the Western Front. After her
last-minute plea to the French president for clemency was denied, French
officers carried out the death sentence on October 15, 1917. Unbound and
refusing a blindfold, Mata Hari was shot by a firing squad at the Caserne de
Vincennes, an old fort outside Paris. Viewed by many as the victim of a
hysterical French press contemptuous of her career as a dancer and courtesan
and seeking a scapegoat, Mata Hari remains one of the most glamorous figures to
come out of the shadowy world of espionage, and the archetype of the female
spy.
Michael Thomas Barry is a
columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that
Shocked Early California,
1849-1949. The book can be purchased from Amazon through the
following link:
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