WAS MATA HARI REALLY A SPY?
100 years ago Sunday, France executed the mysterious and beautiful Mata Hari for spying
Q Who was Mata Hari?
A Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle to a prosperous family in 1876. When Margaretha was a teenager, her father, a hat seller, lost his fortune and left the family. Then her mother died when Margaretha was 15, and she was sent away to live with relatives. She married, at 18, an officer in the East Indies Army who was almost twice her age. It was abusive, and she wrote that he “came close to murdering me with the bread knife.”
Q How did she gain notoriety?
A She left her husband and moved to Paris, leaving her daughter with her ex-husband. She got a job, but also slept with men for pay. But she also began acting and dancing, which is when Margaretha took on the name that would outlive her: Mata Hari. Shamed in the international press as a traitor for her liaisons with German officers during the First World War, she was accused of revealing closely kept secrets about Allied tanks, leading to the deaths of thousands of soldiers.
Q Were the accusations justified?
A Historians are now debunking many of the myths about Mata Hari that have endured for decades. Earlier this year, trial archives kept confidential by the French were released to the public. And a cache of Mata Hari’s personal and family letters were recently published. Taken together, the documents recast the Great War’s most notorious spy as a mother who left an abusive marriage, and as a scapegoat for war-torn France looking to distract from heavy casualties on the front lines.
Q What was her fate?
A In the early hours of Oct. 15, 1917, Mata Hari was shaken awake in her prison cell. She was driven from her cell in the Saint-Lazare prison to an old fort on the outskirts of Paris. It was just past 5:30 a.m. when she faced her firing squad: 12 French officers with their rifles. Offered a white cloth to wear as a blindfold, Mata Hari refused, saying: “Must I wear that?” Legend has it that as the officers drew their weapons, Mata Hari, 41, blew a kiss to her executioners. Then they fired.