This is Mata Hari- or Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She was a Dutch exotic dancer who was convicted of espionage and executed in France during the First World War.
She was born in 1876 in the Frisian city of Leeuwarden. Her father was a hatmaker who eventually went bankrupt. Then he moved to Den Haag, remarried and left his family behind in Leeuwarden. In 1891, Mata’s mom died.
It’s 1895 when Margaretha responds to a contact advert of the twenty-year-old Rudolph Macleod- who is also called John. He was an officer in the Dutch East Indies. The two first met in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and they got engaged within a week. Margaretha is only 18 at that time. After a few years, they move to the Dutch Indies, where they get two kids. They returned to The Netherlands in 1902 and shortly after they separated. The divorce was final in 1907.
After the divorce, Margaretha moves to Paris. In Paris, she tries to provide for herself in many different ways: she becomes a maid, and a model, works in a circus and so on. After a short return to The Netherlands, where she tried to become an actress and singer, she returned to Paris to make it as an ‘exotic’ dancer with her artist name ‘Mata Hari’, which means Eye of the day (the sun basically).
She becomes immediately very successful and gets her big break during a performance at the Museum for Eastern Arts. She says that she was taught this way of dancing as a child by a Javan priest. In 1911, Mata Hari was incredibly famous and performed all over the continent. And, due to her success, she had made it into high society. She had contacts with high-ranked military officers, diplomats and even the German crown Prince.
But then the First World War starts and Mata Hari is in Berlin for a performance. The theatre has closed its doors and she cannot perform. She also has to flee, but cannot return to Paris due to the war, so she chose to return to The Netherlands. This severely hurt her career and she is starting to have financial problems since most of her money is in German banks. Due to the war, the German government took all foreign funds.
It is said that Mata Hari became involved in espionage around that time. It started with contacts with the German intelligence in The Netherlands that gave her the name Spionne H21 in the early spring of 1916. She was given an advance of 20.000 francs and went back to Paris again. Once she was in France, Mata Hari also offered her espionage services to the French. Unfortunately, both the Germans and the French were not completely fooled by her actions and this ultimately cost her life.
The French intelligence service kept an extra eye on her after Scotland Yard gave the French a tip about her. Then she was arrested in Paris after the French intercepted a coded message from the Germans with the text: Agent H 21 is gaan kuren. Shortly before that, Mata Hari had arrived in the spa town of Vittel. Kuren in Dutch, in this case, means going to a kuuroord, which is the Dutch word for spa town.
After a short process, Mata Hari gets the death penalty. Her verdict states that she was guilty of treason for espionage for the Germans. A firing squad executed her on a training ground near the fortress of Vincennes on the 15th of October 1917. Her execution gained a lot of publicity and attention– which made her worldwide famous.
There were also rumours going around that Mata was still alive. It is said that the men of the firing squad didn’t fire the rounds, as Marghareta opened her coat and showed her body shortly before they were supposed to fire at her.
Many years later, British intelligence reopened some of the archives of Mata Hari- which made it very clear that she wasn’t a very efficient spy and that the information the Germans obtained from her wasn’t very valuable.
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