The narrative of Mata Hari, an enigmatic figure both celebrated and vilified, serves as the focal point of our discussion today. On October 15, 1917, in the somber dawn of Paris, Margaretha Gertrude Zell, known to the world as Mata Hari, met her tragic end, accused of espionage and treachery. This episode delves into the complexities of her life, exploring her transformation from an exotic dancer to a purported spy, and the sociopolitical context that rendered her a scapegoat amidst the chaos of World War I. Utilizing recently declassified documents, we shall elucidate the discrepancies between the myth and the reality of her existence, revealing how societal perceptions and prejudices shaped her fate. Ultimately, we seek to unravel the threads of her story, advocating for a reconsideration of the woman behind the legend, and addressing the profound implications of her unjust execution.

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Takeaways:

1. The execution of Mata Hari in 1917 was a deeply controversial event in history.
2. Mata Hari was a complex figure, often misunderstood as a mere seductress and spy.
3. Her trial revealed the biases of the era, particularly against women who wielded power.
4. Historical documents suggest Mata Hari may have been a scapegoat for France's wartime failures.
5. The narrative of Mata Hari as a femme fatale obscures the reality of her life and struggles.
6. Ultimately, Mata Hari's story illustrates the tragic consequences of societal expectations placed upon women.

Sa.

Picture this.

The sky over Paris is a bruised purple, hanging heavy with the fog that rolls off the Seine.

In the eastern Parisian suburb of Vincennes, there stands a beautiful medieval fortress.

The castle generally evokes a sense of royalty, as it was one of the many residents of French kings in the Middle Ages.

That morning on October 15, a small convoy of military vehicles arrived, their engines idling in the quiet morning.

From one of the cars steps a woman.

She's 41 years old.

She's dressed not in a prison uniform, but in a pearl gray dress, immaculate silk stockings and high heeled shoes that click softly on the cobblestones.

She wears a tricorn felt hat with a veil, and she carries herself with the regal bearings of a queen entering a ballroom.

Facing her, 12 French soldiers stand in a line, their rifles grounded.

They are young, nervous.

A French officer approaches the woman holding a strip of white cloth.

He intends to blindfold her.

Looking him directly in the eye, the woman asks, must I wear that?

The officer, taken aback by her composure, stammers that if Madame prefers not to, it's not mandatory.

She nods in response and says, I am ready.

Just before the rifles ring out, she defiantly blows a kiss at her executioners.

That woman was Margaretha Gertrude Zell.

But the world would know her and condemns her still as Mata Hari.

For over a century, her name has been shorthand for a specific kind of female.

The seductress, the vamp, the spider woman who uses sex to extract secrets from powerful men.

Welcome to history's greatest crimes.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Elena.

Today we're stepping into the gaslit salons of the Belle Epoque and the muddy trenches of World War I to tell the story of of Mata Hari's rise to fame as an exotic dancer and courtesan and her downfall as a convicted spy.

During World War I, Margaretha, aka Mata Hari, was hired by both the Germans and the French to seduce and spy on each other and seemingly become a double agent.

And even more serious, she was found guilty of sharing French secrets that resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 Allied soldiers.

Those are damning charges, Elena, but today we are going to reopen the dossier that the French government kept sealed for a century.

And what those documents reveal is incredibly surprising.

They suggest that the Mata Hari wasn't executed because she was some great spy.

Instead, she may have been executed because she was the perfect scapegoat for France at that time.

We're going to dive into who the beautiful Mata Hari actually was.

We're going to look past the oriental veils and the stage makeup of her famous exotic performances to find the real woman underneath.

And we're going to argue that her execution was not a victory for justice, as it was presented at the time, but rather a desperate act of ritual sacrifice at the end of World War I.

She presented herself to her audience as a Javanese princess of priestly Hindu birth who had been schooled in the art of sacred Indian dance since childhood.

But reality was, in fact, very different.

While the other Dutch children were blonde and fair, Margaretha had olive skin, black hair and dark eyes.

Her father nicknamed her his orchid.

Among dandelions, she looked exotic, a trait that she would later weaponize as an adult.

But her comfortable life collapsed when she was 13.

Her father went bankrupt, her parents divorced.

That's a massive scandal.

And her mother died shortly after.

Margarita had then been shuffled off to live with relatives, now suddenly poor and dependent.

This is the first crucial psychological pivot point.

Michael biographer Pat Shipman, who wrote the definitive book Famous Femme Fatale, argues that this fall from grace installed a pathological fear of poverty in Margaretha.

She had tasted luxury and then had it ripped away.

For the rest of her life, she would view money not just as currency, but as a shield against the chaos of the world.

She resolved to never be powerless again,

and she learned very early on that her power lay in her effect on men.

When she matured, Margaretha was described as slender and tall, with blue black hair and the flexible grace of a wild animal.

At 16, she was sent to a teacher's college in Leiden, but she was expelled almost immediately.

Why?

Because the headmaster began making lascivious advances towards her.

Note the dynamic there.

An older man in a position of authority preys on a teenage girl, and she is the one who gets expelled.

It's a pattern that will repeat until the day she died.

Men desired her, men used her, and then men punished her for that desire.

Desperate to escape her grim reality, at 18, she answered a newspaper ad.

It read, quote, officer on home leave from Dutch East Indies would like to meet girl of pleasant character, object matrimony.

The man was Captain Rudolph MacLeod.

He was 20 years older than her, a Scottish Dutch officer in the colonial army.

A marriage to such a man would give Margaretha access to the Dutch upper class and to the financial stability that she longed for.

But instead, she had walked into a nightmare.

Now, it may seem weird for a Dutch couple to move to East Asia, but we have to remember that the 19th century was a time of empire building during which European nations laid claim to colonies in Africa and Asia.

The Netherlands primary money making colony was Indonesia, which they called the Dutch East Indies at the time.

So Margaretha and the Captain, a newly married couple who barely knew each other, moved to the other side of the world.

It must have seemed like such an adventure to the young Margaretha.

I think her naivete helped her ignore the giant red flags.

I think that's probably true.

Within two years, the reality of colonial life had set in.

During that time, they had two children, a boy, followed quickly by a girl.

And while Margaretha was busy being a young mother with a household, she quickly realized how awful her husband was.

He was an alcoholic, a womanizer and violently abusive.

He openly kept a concubine, which was a socially accepted practice in the colony at the time, but was certainly not acceptable to Margaretha.

Eventually, the Captain was posted to a different Indonesian city.

It's unclear how she arranged this, but Margaretha and the children remained behind with the family of another Dutch official.

She must have found a lot of relief from the Captain's absence, because it was during this time that she remade herself.

Friends of Margaretha's in the Netherlands recalled her writing to them to say that she had taken the name Mata Hari, which refers to the sun.

In the local Indonesian language, it literally means eye of the day.

Margaretha began to immerse herself in the local culture.

She learned melee.

She watched the local dances.

She saw how dance in Javanese culture wasn't just entertainment, it was sacred.

It was a language.

But his bad behavior didn't change.

The little boy died while their daughter had barely survived.

The family claimed that an irate servant had poisoned them.

But some historians believe that the illness was actually caused by complications related to the treatment of syphilis contracted from their parents.

Parents?

As mentioned, the captain wasn't exactly monogamous.

Imagine the trauma.

She was in her early 20s, abused by her husband and just watched her son die.

That may have offered some relief and sense of freedom, but life was still pretty miserable for her.

She was destitute because it was difficult for a woman to simply go out and get a respectable job at that time.

And the captain refused to pay alimony.

In a final act of cruelty, the captain also kept custody of their daughter.

Margaretha didn't have the resources to fight the situation and unfortunately accepted it, believing that while her ex husband had been abusive, he had been a good father.

Unfortunately, her daughter later died at the age of 21, possibly from complications related to syphilis.

She had no money, no husband and no child.

Maybe she felt like the only way to go from there was up.

She first performed as a circus horse rider using the name Lady MacLeod.

Her ex husband's last name.

That's savage, but it actually is so perfect.

Eventually she moved on to posing as an artist model.

She tried to teach piano.

Neither was successful and and she was facing the abyss of poverty she feared so much.

And then Margaretha made a life changing choice.

It was ingenious, honestly.

So Margaretha was divorced and barely getting by, but she was smart.

She looked around at the Parisian obsession with the mysterious east and she decided to give them exactly what they wanted.

This was a Parisian golden age of the arts, during which numerous masterpieces of literature, music and theater were produced and gained fame.

This was the Paris of young painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

This was the Paris of Gaston Leroux, author of the Phantom of the Opera and Marcel Proust, who is considered by many to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

But we have to keep in mind that the beauty of the Parisian Belle Epoque had a darker side.

Paris in the late 19th century and early 20th century was the time of Moulin Rouge, that famous cabaret that became famous for its provocative and, at times, scandalous dance performances.

Along those same lines, Europe was also obsessed with the east, but it was a fantasy version of the East, a place of mysticism, sensuality, and primitive passions that repressed Europeans weren't allowed to express absolutely.

And the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of Western fascination with all of the east.

The near east, the Middle east, the Far east, and North Africa.

Historians now call this fascination Orientalism, and it was fueled by colonial expansion and increased travel.

Europeans tended to see themselves as the pinnacle of civilization in comparison to the colonies that they conquered and governed.

In contrast, those subjects were often stereotyped as ignorant and lacking discipline.

The men in the colonies were often portrayed as deviant and violent, while the women in the colonies were portrayed as exotic and lustful.

Within this context, Margaretha reinvented herself as Mata Hari.

Instead of telling people that she was a Dutch divorcee, she presented herself as a Javanese princess, born in a temple, taught to dance by priestesses of Shiva.

Paris was a sensation.

The scene was carefully set statues of Hindu gods, incense smoke thick in the air, dim lighting, and there was Mata Hari, dressed in veils, a jeweled breastplate, and heavy gold bracelets.

She danced, and as she danced, she slowly removed the veils one by one.

Now, let's be clear about what this was.

It was a striptease.

But it was a striptease packaged as high art.

By framing her nudity as a religious ritual to Shiva, Mata Hari gave the elite Parisian audience permission to be voyeurs.

They weren't watching a woman take her clothes off.

No, they were witnessing anthropology.

Exactly.

And Mata Hari was brilliant at marketing this.

Listen to how she described her own act in an interview from the time.

She said, my dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music.

The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple.

I am the temple that is a masterclass in branding.

And the press ate it up.

Le Matin, one of the biggest papers in Paris, was reviewed her performance.

Listen to this breathless praise they give her quote.

Mata Hari, after rapid gyrations, fell exhausted at the feet of her lover, Shiva, the God of destiny, sacrificing herself in ecstasy on his altar.

The audience roared with joy.

But notice the language used by the male Critics it's very revealing.

One reviewer, a Viennese paper, described her as having the flexible grace of a wild animal.

Another called her feline and snake like.

This is the double edged sword of the femme fatale archetype.

On the one hand she is celebrated as a goddess, but on the other, she is dehumanized as an animal, a creature of instinct and danger.

They loved her for being wild and exotic, but those are the exact same traits that they would use to convict her of being a spy 10 years later.

To the French patriarchy, a woman who is feline and wild was fundamentally then untrustworthy.

But for a decade, Mata Hari made it work.

She continued her stage act at various venues around France.

She was photographed nude or nearly so numerous times during this period.

And because her act was considered exotic rather than crude, she continued to mingle in wealthy circles, which also led her to become a famous courtesan.

She slept with ministers, generals and industrialists.

She commanded huge fees.

And her relationships and liaisons with powerful men frequently took her across international borders.

She finally had the financial shield she had always wanted.

Margaretha.

Now 38 years old, she was gaining weight.

The critics were getting meaner.

Younger dancers were copying her act.

And then the music stopped.

His death triggered a domino effect through complex alliances that pitted Austria and Germany against Serbia, Russia, France and Great Britain.

By the way, if you find this topic interesting, you can find another podcast episode on this topic within our library of podcast episodes.

But regarding the Mata Hari, before World War I, she was generally viewed as an artist in a free spirited bohemian.

But as war approached, she began to be seen as by some as a wanton and promiscuous woman.

Perhaps she was even a dangerous seductress.

And her cosmopolitan border crossing life suddenly looked very suspicious.

We should keep in mind that Mata Hari, AKA Margaretha, was a Dutch citizen.

The Netherlands were neutral in World War I, and this meant that she could travel between France, Britain and Germany, crossing battle lines that were impassable to everyone else.

To her, this was a convenience that allowed her to keep seeing her lovers.

To the intelligence agencies, though, it was a red flag the size of a house.

This is where the tragedy then begins.

Margaretha was politically naive.

She didn't understand nationalism.

She saw herself as an international citizen.

She didn't hate the Germans.

She also didn't hate the French.

She just wanted to survive and maintain her lifestyle.

Her assets in France were frozen.

The German consul in Amsterdam, a man named Karl Cromer, approached her.

Now, he knew she had access to high ranking Allied officers, so he offered her 20,000 francs, which was about $60,000 today, to report on what she heard in Paris.

She took the money.

The Germans gave her a bottle of invisible ink and the codename H21.

Now, Michael, we have to pause here.

This is the smoking gun, right?

She took German money and she had a code name.

So this was case closed, right?

Well, not exactly.

Taking the money is one thing, Earning the money is another.

Margaritha later claimed she treated the money as compensation for further furs and jewelry the Germans had confiscated from her in Berlin at the start of the war.

She threw the invisible ink into the canal.

There is no evidence she ever sent a single piece of useful intelligence to the Germans.

She maybe just took the cash and ghosted them.

Which fits her personality perfectly.

She was a courtesan.

Her entire career was built on transactional relationships where she extracted money from men in exchange for an illusion.

She thought she could do the same thing to the German Empire.

And like this time, was real love.

His name was Vladimir Damaslov, a 21 year old Russian captain fighting for the French.

He had been gassed and he had lost an eye.

Margaretha was desperate to marry him and take care of him, but she now needed more money.

Enter Captain Georges Ladoux, the head of French counterintelligence.

Ledoux was a man under pressure.

He suspected that Mata Hari was a German spy, but he didn't have proof.

So he set a trap.

He offered to hire her as a spy for France.

Margaretha, thinking that this was her big break, to earn a dowry for her marriage to Maslov, agreed.

She looked Ledoux in the eye and demanded 1 million francs to seduce the German High Command.

Now imagine the hubris, but also the desperation.

She's telling the head of French intelligence, I can win this war for you, just pay me.

Ledoux agreed to the mission, but he didn't give her any money.

Instead, he sent her to Spain to try out her skills.

Either she would be successful or she would be revealed as a traitor to the Allies.

When Mata Hari got to Madrid, she met with the German military attache, a man named Major Arnold Kahl.

She asked if he could arrange a meeting with the German Crown Prince.

But then she said something else.

She apparently added that she was willing to share French secrets with the German Empire in exchange for money.

It's unclear whether Mata Hari was actually trying to double cross the French or whether this was part of her plan to meet with and seduce some secrets out of the German Crown Prince.

Regardless, German Major Kahl wasn't stupid.

He realized she was playing him and so he decided to burn her.

First major call sent a series of telegrams to Berlin detailing the helpful activities of his agent H21 for the German and the Axis powers.

He included details about H21 that could only refer to the Mata Hari.

But here is the critical part.

Since Kahl didn't trust the Mata Hari, he sent these messages using a code he knew the French had already broken.

This was the knife in the back.

The Germans knew the French were listening.

They intentionally fed the French the proof they needed to arrest her.

Why?

Because she was useless to Germany at that point.

She was a loose end.

By exposing her, they could distract French counterintelligence and sow chaos.

French listening posts on the Eiffel Tower intercepted the messages.

And French Captain Georges Ledoux now had his his proof.

He ignored the fact that the Germans likely wanted him to read it.

He ignored the fact that she was trying to spy for him.

She was taken to St Lazare Prison, a rat infested hellhole.

She was kept in isolation for months.

Her interrogator was Captain Pierre Bouchardon.

And if you want to understand why she was convicted, you have to look inside this man's head.

Bouchardin wasn't just hunting a spy, he was hunting a witch.

He hated everything she stood for.

We actually have Boucherdon's personal notes and memoirs.

The language he uses to describe her is visceral.

He didn't focus on military data, he focused on her immorality and his goal to reveal that the Mata Hari Persona was entirely invisible.

He insisted that far from being a Javanese princess, Mata Hari was a white Dutch national.

A fact he used as evidence of her dubious and dishonest character at her trial.

He said she was feline, supple and artificial, accustomed to gambling everything and anything, without scruple, without pity, always ready to devour fortunes, leaving her ruined lovers to blow their brains out.

She was a born spy.

A born spy not because she stole documents, but because she devoured fortunes and was artificial.

In Boucherdon's mind, a woman who used sex to survive was inherently capable of treason.

The two crimes in his mind, were identical in this moral universe, but they needed specific charges.

And this is where the case against Mata Hari moves from flimsy to absurd.

The prosecution accused her of eight counts of espionage, one of which implied that she had given Germans the technical blueprints for military tanks and plans of an Allied offensive.

Tanks, also known as the time as landships, were important in World War I because they could cross the trenches and thus help break the trench stalemate.

Plus, the idea that a courtesan in Madrid could get technical blueprints for a secret weapon she had likely never seen is laughable.

As British historian Julie Wheelwright explains, Mata Hari didn't pass on anything that you couldn't find in the local newspapers.

They believed she was a monster.

And we have to talk about why the public was so ready to believe it.

The war had dragged on for years and led to so many deaths.

General Nivelle promised a swift victory within 48 hours by smashing through German lines.

But the reality was a bloody stalemate that led to 120,000 French, British and Russian casualties.

The French soldiers had had enough.

They didn't want to fight anymore, so they mutinied.

Regiments refused to go to the front.

Some even bawed like sheep as they marched, signaling that they were being led to the slaughter.

The government was terrified.

If the army collapsed, Paris would fall, which would likely cause France to completely fall to Central Powers.

But they couldn't admit that their generals were incompetent.

They couldn't admit the war was a meat grinder.

They needed a reason for the failure that came from outside.

They needed a traitor.

Who better than a spy?

A foreigner who had seduced their sons and sold their secrets.

Mata Hari wasn't executed really for what she did.

She was executed to boost morale.

As a historian, I'd argue this was a state sanctioned ritual murder to exorcise the demons of the Nivelle offensive.

Inside St. Lazar Prison, Margaretha slowly realized that her charm wasn't going to save her this time.

Her letters from prison are heartbreaking.

They aren't the letters of a master spy.

They are the letters of a desperate, confused mother.

She wrote constantly to her lawyer, Maitre Clunet, an old lover who was hopelessly out of his depth.

And she tried to write to her daughter, who was still alive at that point.

Here's an excerpt from one of those undelivered letters.

I am not French.

I have no duty to France, but I have never done anything to harm this country.

I have never been a spy.

I am totally desperate, end quote.

She also wrote a line that I think is the most pointed summary of her life.

She wrote, quote, mata Hari and Madam Zel are two different people.

That which is permitted to one is certainly not permitted to the other, end quote.

She was trying to tell them the Mata Hari is a character, she's a stage act.

You are putting a stage act on trial.

But the court didn't care.

The trial was held in camera, which means in secret, no press, no public.

The evidence was entirely circumstantial, based on the German messages about Mata Hari that were intercepted.

Her defense was blocked from calling any key witnesses.

But honestly, Mata Hari didn't have many people who would still stand as witnesses for her.

Even her former lover, the Russian Captain Maslov, whom she had wanted to marry so badly, declined to testify for her and told her that he didn't care if she was convicted.

When she learned that Maslov himself had abandoned her, she fainted.

After the trial, it took the military tribunal less than an hour to reach a verdict.

Guilty on all counts, the sentence being death.

When told the verdict, she screamed out, it's impossible.

It's impossible.

We actually have a remarkable primary source for this event.

Henry Wales, a reporter for the International News Service, was one of the few witnesses permitted to attend.

His report was filed days later.

Wales describes the 41 year old Margaretha waking up.

She put on her stockings, her heels.

She complained that breakfast wasn't served.

She was terrified, but she locked it down.

She treated the execution as her final premiere.

Wales wrote, quote, she displayed a courage that was nothing short of marvelous.

She stepped out of the automobile with the air of one going to a tea party.

Wales doesn't mention that kiss she blew to her executioners in his original report, though later retellings added it.

It's possible that it's true that it's something that Margaretha Mata Hari actually did.

It's also possible that it was something added later as an embellishment.

But what Wales does record is just as powerful.

After refusing the blindfold with that line, must I wear that?

She stood perfectly still.

She looked at the 12 men.

She didn't cry, she didn't beg.

The order was given.

Jouer, or fire Wales, wrote that in the seconds afterwards, slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head always and without the slightest change of expression on her face.

Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up under her.

She did not die like an actor, she died like a queen.

A non commissioned officer then walked up to her body and delivered the coup de grace, a revolver shot to her temple.

It was over.

Nobody claimed the body.

Her daughter Nan likely never knew the details until much later.

Margaretha's body was sent to the University of Paris Medical School for dissection.

Four days after her execution, Captain Ledoux, the man who had framed her, was arrested for espionage himself.

That is the ultimate irony.

The French intelligence service was so paranoid, so cannibalistic, that it started eating its own.

It was kind of all just smoke and mirrors.

So the ultimate question then, was she innocent?

If by innocent you mean did Mata Hari never take German money?

Then no, she took the cash.

Mata hari was age 21.

But if by innocent you mean did Mata Hari betray Allied secrets that killed soldiers, then yes, she was innocent.

Margaretha didn't tell the Germans any secrets, just gossip she picked up in hotels.

She was a bad spy, a clumsy amateur.

But the myth of the Mata Harithe lethal seductress was more useful to the world than the messy reality of Margaretha's.

The French needed a villain to explain their failures.

In the end, she was a victim of the very Persona she created.

She spent her life pretending to be an exotic woman of mystery, and the world believed her so thoroughly that they killed her for it.

As the smoke cleared that morning, the myth became immortal.

Many movies and plays were made about her.

But the real woman, the abused wife, the grieving mother, the hatmaker's daughter, all that was erased.

And perhaps that is the greatest crime of all, one that we hope to put to some rights through this podcast episode.

Thanks for listening to history's Greatest crimes.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Elena.

Until next time, stay curious.

Sa.