Mata Hari, who was shot and killed as a spy

Mata Hari, who was shot and killed as a spy
(1876-1917)

Mata Hari was a professional dancer and mistress of many people who became a spy in France during World War I. Suspected of being a double agent, she was executed in 1917.
Who is Mata Hari?
Mata Hari was a professional dancer and mistress of many people, and in 1916 she accepted an espionage assignment for France. Hired by army captain Georges Ladoux, she agreed to pass on military information gleaned from her conquests to the French government. Soon, however, Mata Hari was accused of being a German spy. She was executed by firing squad on October 15, 1917 after the French authorities learned of her double agency.
early life
Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, on August 7, 1876, to Adam Zelle, a hat merchant who went bankrupt due to bad investments, and Antje Zelle, who fell ill and died when Mata Hari was 15 years old. After her mother's death, Mata Hari and her three brothers were separated and sent to live with different relatives.
At an early age, Mata Hari decided that sex was her ticket to life. In the mid-1890s, she bravely answered a newspaper ad seeking a bride for Rudolph McLeod, a bald, mustachioed army captain based in the Dutch East Indies. She sent him a striking photo of herself with gorgeous hair and olive skin to tempt him. Despite a 21-year age gap, they married on 11 July 1895, when Mata Hari was 19 years old. During their nine-year marriage - McLeod's heavy drinking and his wife's frequent outbursts at the attention of others. Mata Hari gave birth to two children, a daughter and a son. (The couple's son died in 1899 after a domestic servant in India poisoned him for reasons that remain a mystery.)
By the early 1900s, Mata Hari's marriage was deteriorating. Her husband fled with their daughter and Mata Hari went to Paris. There she became the mistress of a French diplomat and conceived the idea of supporting herself as a dancer.
Foreign dancer and mistress
1905 Paris was the prime time for Mata Hari's exotic appearance and her creation of "temple dances" based on cultural and religious symbols. She seized the moment with characteristic confidence. She veiled her body artistically and introduced herself as a Hindu artist. In one memorable garden performance, Mata Hari appeared naked on a white horse. Although she boldly exposed her buttocks, she was modest about her breasts, which were usually covered with brass-patterned beads. Completing her dramatic transformation from army wife to siren of the East, she coined the stage name "Mata Hari," meaning "eye of the day" in the Indonesian dialect.
Mata Hari captured the Paris dance halls and then went on to brilliant shows in other cities. Along the way, she helped turn striptease into an art form and attract critics. A reporter from Vienna described Mata Hari as "slender and tall with blue-black hair, with the flexible grace of a wild animal". Her face, he wrote, "makes a strange foreign impression." Another curious newspaper writer called her "so catty, so feminine, so gloriously tragic, the curves and movements of her body quivering with a thousand rhythms."
However, within a few years, Mata Hari's dances faded away. Her bookings were sporadic as young dancers took to the stage. She supplemented her income by seducing government and military officials. Sex became a strictly financial practice for her. Despite the growing tensions in Europe in the years leading up to World War I, Mata Hari knew no boundaries with her lovers, including German officials. As war spread across the continent, as a citizen of neutral Holland she had freedom of movement and made the most of it, flinging herself from country to country in beautiful clothes. Soon, however, Mata Hari's equestrian trips and connections caught the attention of British and French intelligence agencies, who put her under surveillance.
A spy for France
Now nearly 40 years old, fat and clearly behind her dancing without much demand, Mata Hari fell in love with the 21-year-old Russian captain Vladimir de Masloff in 1916. During their courtship, Masloff was sent to the front, where he was wounded. He blinded one eye. Determined to earn money to help him, Mata Hari accepted a lucrative assignment to spy for France from Georges Ladoux, an army captain who assumed her courtly connections would be of use to French intelligence.

Mata Hari later insisted that she had planned to use her connections to lure her to the German High Command, obtain secrets and pass them on to the French - but she never got that far.
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