Mata Hari

Mata Hari

Dutch dancer and secret agent; born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She probably worked for both French and German intelligence services before being executed by the French in 1917.

She meets Rudolph MacLeod, who has just returned from the Dutch East Indies where he served as a Colonel in the Dutch Army.

Margarete Gertrud Zelle is born in Leeuwarden, Holland to a Dutch shopkeeper and a woman of Javanese descent.

Aug. 7, 1876

Both of the children are poisoned, allegedly by a lover of the children's nurse. Norman dies and Jeanne-Louise survives.

Moves to Paris, takes on the stage name Mata Hari, and becomes a nude dancer portraying herself as a Javanese princess. Margarete made her debut as an oriental dancer in Paris.

She has an affair with Major Arnold Kalle, a German spymaster who sets her up to be discovered by the Allies as a spy, though she had not given up any sensitive information to the Germans.

1894

History

Jun. 25, 1899

1905

1916

Oct. 15, 1917

Feb. 13, 1917

She is arrested at Elysees Palace Hotel in Paris by the French Secret Service on suspicion of spying for Germany against the French and British, though there is no evidence against her except for some secret ink found in her room. Under intense interrogation, she confesses to passing inconsequential information to the Germans and that she went by the pseudonym of H21.

Mata Hari is bound to the stake to be executed by a 12-man firing squad. She refuses a blindfold and blows a kiss to the squad before they shoot her. Her ex-husband says: "Whatever she’s done in life, she did not deserve that."