Her oriental dance with made her an icon of the turn of the 20th century. As a half naked
medium she cast a spell over her audience to become a star. Emancipated up to her black
garter, she could wrap politicians around her finger and influential military officers
ate out of the palm of her manicured hand. She was none other than Margaretha Geertruida
Zelle - the Mata Hari.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War bio special of “Who did what in World War
One?”, today starring Mata Hari.
Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in 1876 in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands to a wealthy
family. Her father Adam was a hat merchant. He was also a real party animal and a financial
speculator, who eventually went bankrupt. When Margaretha was 15, her mother Antje died,
and her penniless father took her twin sister with him to start a new life, leaving Margaretha
and her younger brother with their Godfather. She was sent to a girls’ boarding school
and was expected to become a governess.
However, at the age of 17 she was accused of having an affair with the 50-something
school director and was expelled from school. She then lived with an uncle in The Hague.
Two years later she answered a newspaper ad placed by Rudolph John MacLeod, a military
captain in the Dutch East Indies, looking for a wife. She sent a photo of herself; beautiful,
young, raven hair, olive skin. MacLeod was smitten and despite the 21-year age difference,
they married July 11th, 1895.
The lived initially in Amsterdam, but would relocate to Indonesia. The rocky marriage
would last nine years, and would produce two children, a son and a daughter. MacLeod was
an alcoholic, and went into frequent rages because of the attention his beautiful young
wife got from the other officers. He also had a mistress, which was an accepted practice
in Indonesia at the time, but it certainly didn’t make Margaretha very happy, and she
abandoned him for a time. She joined a local dance company, and in 1897 first adopted the
artist name Mata Hari, Malay for sun, and which literally means “eye of the day”.
As her marriage crumbled, tragedy struck when her children became violently ill. It’s
not exactly certain the cause; the family claimed they were poisoned by a servant, but
other evidence suggests it was from complications arising from the treatment of syphilis they
had inherited from their parents. In any case, the three-year-old son dies. The parents soon
returned to Europe and MacLeod left Margaretha, taking the daughter with him.
Alone and penniless in Paris, she first earned a living as a horseback rider in a circus,
and then posed as an artist’s model. In 1905, she met Emile Guimet, who invited her
to dance in his museum, and she began to support herself as a dancer, under the name Mata Hari,
and she was a hit, taking the Paris salons by storm and touring the continent.
All things “oriental” were the rage of the time, and Mata Hari’s exotic looks and
“temple dance”, based on what she’s learned in Indonesia, wowed the crowds. She
even had a new backstory:
"I was born in the holy city of Jaffnapatam. My father was a highly regarded Brahman, my
mother a temple dancer who died when giving birth to me at the age of fourteen. I grew
up as a charge of the temple priests. They consecrated me to Siva and I was introduced
to the holy mysteries of love and divine worship,"
Draped in veils and almost nothing else, she would appear on a white horse, daringly baring
her posterior, though she kept her breasts covered with beads, and the siren of the east
helped turn striptease into a popular art form.
But, as we know, beauty fades, and within only a few years, Mata Hari’s bookings were
few and far between as the next generation of dancers took over. In order to maintain
her lifestyle, she seduced government and military figures. Her final live show was
March 13, 1915.
By this time, the war was in full swing, but as a Dutch national, and the Netherlands being
neutral, she could cross national borders, and country hopped, eventually coming under
the scrutiny of British and French intelligence. And then the surprising happened; Mata Hari
fell in love. Yep, she fell for a 21-year-old Russian captain in 1916, and when he was wounded,
she accepted lucrative assignments spying for France from an army Captain George Ladoux,
who figured her contacts would help French intelligence.
Okay, I’ve just said that, but it’s really unclear just what her spying activities actually
were if any; different sources say different things. One source says that first she gave
the Germans some- as she claimed- outdated French intelligence for money, and she herself
claimed she worked for the French spying in Belgium. When she was picked up by the British
while in England, she told them she worked for French intelligence, but nobody backed
her up. Then again, maybe they didn’t want to blow her cover.
She herself insisted later that her plan was to seduce her way into the German High Command
and turn their secrets over to the French, but that never happened.
In January 1917, A German attaché in Spain transmitted messages with info he’d gotten
from a spy he referred to as H-21. The French intercepted these messages and from the info
identified the German spy as Mata Hari. However, there are claims that the Germans knew the
code the messages were transmitted in had already been broken and the messages were
meant to be intercepted. This seems not to be true to me, since that was the same code
the Zimmerman Telegram was transmitted in, during the same month, and you should look
that up, but that was definitely not meant to be intercepted.
Again, whatever the reality was, Mata Hari was arrested in February 1917 in Paris and
tried as a German spy on July 24th. When she admitted that a German officer had paid her
for sexual favors, the prosecution painted it as espionage money. The military tribunal
took less than 45 minutes to find her guilty of spying, which isn’t surprising since
it seems her defense attorney was not allowed to cross examine the prosecution’s witnesses
nor to question her directly.
Mata Hari was executed by firing squad October 15th, 1917 at the age of 41. At her execution
she waved away the blindfold and supposedly blew the soldiers a kiss.
“The Historical Dictionary of German Intelligence” says that German documents unsealed in the
1970s show that Mata Hari really was a German spy, but there’s been so much conjecture
and contradictory information about her that I’m not sure just what to believe.
But the idea of a femme fatale, an exotic dancer working as a double agent, using seduction
to discover military and government secrets has really stuck in the public imagination
and there have been, and continue to be, plays and films about her life and death, notably
the 1931 films Mata Hari starring Greta Garbo.
So there you have it in a short tale, a woman whose fame or infamy from the First World
War has endured for a century, Mata Hari.
Mata Hari was definitely one of these women in the early 20th century that lived enough
for two. Another women whose live as a Serbian soldier you might find even more surprising
was Milunka Savic and you can find out all about her right here.
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