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Jul 27, 2019 · With the passing of time her Mata Hari persona has assumed an elevated, almost mythical status as numerous films (such as Greta Garbo’s legendary 1931 portrayal), plays, and books have presented her as a mysterious and cunning femme fatale. The ultimate exotic spy.
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The abandoned daughter of a bankrupt Dutch hatter, Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, on Aug. 7, 1876. Orphaned at 15 by the death of her mother, the impoverished girl did have one thing going for her: At five-feet-ten, the dark-haired, dark-eyed young Amazon was an exotic specimen by Dutch standards. Mar...
Entertainment of one kind or another was a mainstay of such affairs in those days, and so, one evening, murmuring in Malay and clothed in little more than half a dozen diaphanous silk veils, Zelle cavorted before an audience of dowagers and dilettantes in a riotously suggestive dance of her own invention. Overnight, she became the darling of the de...
Still craving the old excitement, she would return to Paris like a moth to a flame several times over the next two years, no small feat in a Europe convulsed by war. But Paris was different now—a wartime capital. The woman who had counted among her lovers so many highly placed German officers before the war now began to suspect that she was being f...
Ladoux coolly grilled the aging courtesan in an attempt to determine where her sympathies lay in the Allied struggle against Germany. Although officially a Dutch neutral, she declared that she considered herself a Parisienne and naturally hoped for a French victory. Ladoux then asked her if she would consider demonstrating this loyalty by making us...
British intelligence at the time were obsessed with a woman living in Spain who went by the name of Clara Benedix. She claimed to be Spanish. She was not, nor was she the humble flamenco dancer that she claimed to be. Clara Benedix, if that was even her name, was a German spy. The fact that Mata Hari was both a woman and a dancer was enough to conv...
The vindictive Major Kalle was, as it turned out, using a code that he knew the French had already broken when he sent those messages; he wanted the enemy to read them. One can only conclude that his goal was to try and trick the French into setting the dogs on one of their own. It worked. Amid wartime hysteria, more than one person went to the gal...
When the sentence was carried out, an official stepped forward and asked, as is the tradition, if there was anyone to claim the body. No one did. It is a final irony that the celebrated beauty who shared her embrace with so many should share the fate of the lonely impoverished nobodies of Paris, as just another cadaver on a medical school’s dissect...
Nov 24, 2009 · Mata Hari, the dancer and spy, is executed for espionage by a French firing squad outside of Paris. She was accused of acting as a double agent for the French and Germans during World War II.
Execution scene from 1920 film about Mata Hari [51] The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale .
Oct 17, 2017 · Images show Mata Hari, the Dutch-born woman executed by a French firing squad on October 15 1917, posing in a variety of vibrant colours for a series of postcards sold in Paris the early...
Oct 15, 2017 · The commander lowered his sword in a swift motion, there was the sound of rifle fire, and Mata Hari crumpled to her knees. An officer approached with a revolver and shot her once through the...
After the execution, no-one came to claim Mata Hari's body. So it was delivered to the school of medicine in Paris where it was used for lessons in dissection. Her head was preserved at the...
