Mata Hari, nee Margaretha Geertruida, was considered to be the ultimate femme fatale for much of the 20th century. Making waves as an exotic dancer in the years before the First World War, Mata Hari became known as a seductress of powerful men who used her feminine wiles as a spy for the Germans.
Mata Hari was indeed charming. She learned from her youth that her well being depended on powerful men, and that she could earn their favors by manipulating them with her wit and sexuality. Growing up in Holland, Mata Hari (a stage name she gave herself) studied several languages and was en route to be a teacher when she was expelled from her school at age 16 for having an affair with the headmaster. She became a mail-order bride for a wealthy man in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) only two years later. Her much older husband was a wife-beating philanderer who gave Mata Hari syphilis — so she left him.
Returning to Europe, Mata Hari created a persona as an exotic dancer with “Oriental” blood whose movements — and strip tease — avoided censureship because she claimed they were from a Hindu religious tradition. None of this was true, but it brought the performer fame and then plenty of lovers as she moulded her career to that of a courtesan.
In World War I her many languages and contacts with powerful men eventually got her the attention of Georges Ladoux, head of the French counterespionage unit. Ladoux eventually set up Mata Hari as a scapegoat for the French: the war was not going well, and the execution of a German spy was something that he thought would boost citizen morale. Her trial was run roughshod, with the prosecutor known for his hatred of “immoral” women. In the trial, the charges of spying were vague, but her sexual promiscuity was highlighted.
On October 15, 1917, Mata Hari was executed by gunshot. She performed courageously to the end, blowing a kiss to the firing squad.
Source(s): _National Geographic_, “Why Mata Hari wasn’t a cunning spy after all,” Pat Shipman, Oct 14, 1917. Wikipedia.
