What happened to Mata Hari’s head?
Mata Hari’s extraordinary life began in the Netherlands in August 1876. In 1906, this controversial woman (born Margaretha Zelle) had divorced her husband. In an attempt to find income for her family, she took up exotic dancing in Paris under the stage name of ‘Mata Hari’, meaning ‘the Rising Sun’ in Malay.
Mata Hari became a huge success in Paris and other cities of Europe. It was rumoured that many of her followers became her lovers and increasingly talked to her about their jobs. Many were military officers, and the information was of potentially great value.
Early in the First World War, a German official offered Hari money in exchange for information. In Paris in February 1917, she was arrested for being a German spy. The French authorities blamed her for the deaths of 50,000 soldiers, supposedly killed on the basis of the information she had passed to
France’s enemies. A French military court found her guilty and, in October 1917, she was executed by firing squad.
In death, Mata Hari has become more famous than she was in life. Many films have been made about her life, and there remains a good deal of speculation about whether she actually was a spy.
At some point after her death, Hari’s head was removed, embalmed and taken to the French Museum of Anatomy. According to accounts, her hair retained the fiery red colour she had been famed for during her life. In 2000 the museum undertook an inventory of its collection. Unfortunately, no trace could be found of Hari’s head, which had last been seen in 1954. The best that its curator could say was that “no one knows where [it] could be”. Like so much about Mata Hari, it remains a mystery.