Mata Hari: Mysterious, exotic, seductive

By Dennis Casey
HQ AIA/History Office
Kelly Air Force Base, Texas

For at least two generations following World War I, the very mention of Mata Hari evoked thoughts of mysterious, exotic and highly seductive Oriental dancing and of spying.

It certainly remains questionable whether Mata Hari’s dancing alone would have been important enough to make her name a household word in the English language. “She’s a real Mata Hari” became a commonly used phrase in England following the war. The combination of her dancing and alleged spying brought her international recognition and notoriety.

Little in her early years suggested she would become a famed dancer and infamous spy. Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida on August 7, 1876, in Leeuwarden, a city in the northern province of Friesland in Holland. Her father, Adam Zelle and her mother, Antze van der Meulen, were hardly the Japanese prince and the baroness known in the press as her parents.

Early in her career, Mata Hari surrounded herself in fantasies about her background that in time would extend to her entire life experience. By the time she was a young adult, fantasy had become so much a part of her life that it was difficult to determine fiction from reality.

Margaretha’s father, however, was a successful merchant. He owned a hat store that enjoyed a flourishing business. From that success, Mr. Zelle provided handsomely for his wife and four children including Margaretha, the only daughter. She benefited from her father’s success and attended a private school frequented by the daughters of socially established citizens. In 1889, the family moved to The Hague where she grew into a beautiful young lady.

In 1894, Margaretha met the love of her life. The man who would become her husband, Rudolph MacLeod, had returned from the Dutch East Indies where he served as a colonial in the Dutch Army.

After a four-month engagement, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle became Mrs. MacLeod on July 11, 1895. The newly married couple returned to the Dutch East Indies where in the next two years a son and a daughter would join the family.

Marital bliss could not appropriately describe the relationship between Marga-retha and her husband. By late 1899, financial troubles and Rudolph’s marital infidelities caused cracks in the marriage. The death of their two-and-a-half-old son in 1899 prompted a downhill slide that ended in marital separation in 1902.

Mrs. MacLeod returned to The Hague and after a brief period of living with her parents, decided to seek her fame and fortune in Paris.

Paris in the first years of the twentieth century seemed a city filled with gaiety and charm and a pleasure-seeking high society willing to pay handsomely for the sensual and the unusual. Parisians seemed enveloped in what could only be described as affairs of the heart. The future Mata Hari took to this lifestyle like a budding flower to sunshine.

Margaretha made her debut as an oriental dancer at Mme. Kireevsky salon in Paris 1905.

As early as February 4, 1905, an English weekly in Paris enthusiastically described her dance as a series of sensuous movements filled with the mystery of the Far East where successive encircling opaque veils were discarded to reveal an idyllic female form. Soon, Margaretha became Lady MacLeod or as one advertisement billed her, the illustrious and voluptuous Mata Hari.

Within weeks, she had performed before ambassadors and aristocratic guests and the cream of Paris society. Flowers appeared at her stage doors and she collected calling cards from Europe’s wealthy and from musical giants like Massenet and Puccini. Mata Hari had launched her career.

Over the next several years, Mata Hari performed at most of the major cities in Western Europe. Her dances became media events of their day in Berlin, Vienna, Monte Carlo, Rome, Milan, Nice and, of course, Paris.

When she was not working, Mata Hari carried out love affairs with an impressive sequence of military men and became the mistress of several. She once told her agent that men regarded her as the ideal Venus. By 1915, with the world war in full swing, demands for Mata Hari’s dancing had fallen off. In need of money, she began traveling to do shows. After being seen in the company of German officers, she became a suspected foreign agent. The British felt so strongly about this that they refused to grant her a visa to visit Great Britain.

By June 1916, the Intelligence Service in Paris began to keep track of Mata Hari at the request of Scotland Yard. It was also in this period that Mata Hari became uncompromisingly promiscuous and accepted handsome amounts of money from several military officers. She exploited men for her own benefit and went from one to another to maintain her elegant lifestyle that included living in some of Europe’s most fashionable hotels. To help maintain this lifestyle, she agreed to spy for the French for one million francs.

Meanwhile, the British arrested her on the assumption that she was really Clara Benedix, a suspected German spy. From this point on, the French agreed and approached Mata Hari as if she were a German spy. Finally on February 13, 1917, the French police arrested her at Elysees Palace Hotel in Paris and accused her of espionage. From her cell in the Saint Lazare prison in February 1917, the French carefully prepared their case against her.

The French prosecutors claimed she had supplied the Germans with valuable military information but in her trial, the prosecutors failed to produce any solid evidence. Interestingly, the trial took place at a time when French morale had reached an all-time low. The war had resulted in terrible losses and the fighting had reached a stalemate. Mutiny had even occurred within the French units. In this atmosphere of hatred and suspicion, the chances for acquittal quickly became remote.

The trial found Mata Hari guilty of espionage.

On the morning of October 15, 1917, the exotic dancer known for her exquisite beauty and art, put on a pearl-grey dress with a veil and her best pair of shoes and walked to an inner court of the Chateau of Vincennes. Here she met death at the hands of a French Army firing squad. Her estranged husband really had the last word, “Whatever she’s done in life, she did not deserve that.”