Kill hari
Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, August 7, 1876-Vincennes, near Paris, France, October 15, 1917), better known as Mata Hari (from matahari, which in Malay means 'Sun', literally 'eye of the day'), was a famous Dutch dancer, courtesan, and spy.
With brahmanical and oriental dances he triumphed in Europe. During the First World War, she carried out espionage work for Germany, for which she was arrested by French forces, found guilty of espionage and treason, sentenced to death, and executed by firing squad on October 15, 1917, at the Fortress of Vincennes.
Biography
Despite traditional claims that Mata Hari was of Javanese, i.e. Indonesian, ancestry, scholars conclude that she had no Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry and that her parents were Dutch.
She was the eldest daughter of hatter Adam Zelle (1840-1910) and Antje van der Meulen (1842-1891), and had three sons. Her parents divorced and her mother passed away a couple of years after the divorce; her father later married Susanna Catharina ten Hoove (1844-1913).
His teenage daughter, who was beginning to stand out for her beauty, went to live with her godfather. At the age of 16, Mata Hari (still known as Margaretha) studied at a special school where, at the same time as they were educated, the girls were trained to become teachers, and there she became involved with one of the directors of the school., for which she was expelled and went to live with her uncle.
In 1895, he responded to an advertisement for a wife by Captain Rudolf MacLeod (1856-1928), a military man 20 years his senior. After maintaining a brief communication by correspondence, they were married in Amsterdam on July 11, 1895, when she was about to turn 19 years old.
The couple moved to Java, where MacLeod had been posted, and had two children: Norman-John, born January 30, 1897, and Louise Jeanne, born May 2, 1898. In 1899, the children they fell ill and Norman-John passed away. Although it was initially believed that he had died of complications from treatment of syphilis contracted by his parents, it was later discovered that both children had been poisoned in revenge against Rudolph for his mistreatment of a native servant, who sent his wife, the maid of the house, to poison the family. The death of this son was a severe blow to an already deteriorating marriage. Her husband sought refuge in drink. It is said that this loneliness led Mata Hari to her first contacts with Javanese culture, especially with Balinese folk dances and oriental lovemaking techniques, which gave her fame as a luxury courtesan years later.
Exotic dancer and courtesan
Back in Europe, the couple were legally separated in the Netherlands on August 30, 1902, and in 1906 the divorce trial took place and despite initially having custody of their daughter, her husband he withdrew from her, he stated, because of her debauched life on the island.
In Paris in 1903 she made some attempts as a nude model for artists with the name of Lady MacLeod, which entailed a real trauma in her life due to lack of economic resources to live, since her income was very low.
At the end of 1904, she returned to Paris, armed with courage and supported by her oriental knowledge. The romantic escape literature of the late 19th century had popularized a diffuse and long-cherished image of Eastern culture. Taking advantage of these circumstances, and thanks to the long dark hair and foreign features inherited from her mother, she posed as a supposed princess of Java with the name Mata Hari, which means Sun in Malay (Mata = Eye, Hari = Day; Mata Hari = The eye of the day), and debuted at the Guimet Museum owned by the collector Émile Étienne Guimet on March 13, 1905, and from there she lived as an exotic dancer, starring in strip-tease shows that began to earn him a certain renown. The lie and imagination, as an obligatory way out to overcome her painful economic situation, began to bear fruit and in view of its advantageous consequences, they became commonplace. In Paris there was a stir with real struggles to get seats in the first rows in her erotic and exotic dance shows. She danced the sacred dances that she claimed she had learned with her people since her childhood, and she used fine translucent veils, which she gradually took off during the act, until she was dressed only in a mesh of the same color as her skin and jewels. orientals that he wore Although she gave the illusion that she was almost completely undressed, which was the main attraction of her number, and even she acted as a courtesan, the truth is that she never got to show her breasts. She put on two jeweled metal domes held by chains, with which she concealed them. The publicity photographs of her shows were very popular.
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Sheltered by the myth she had created, she had secret affairs with numerous military officials and even high-level politicians, and in general, with high society. By 1910, many imitators had emerged, and although her fame and that of her shows grew, the truth is that she was losing her physical charms; Age and the physical change that this entails made her focus more on courtesan work as a form of livelihood.
At that time, he tried to get his daughter back, who lived with her father, but it proved impossible. He sent her housekeeper, who returned empty-handed after several hours of waiting at the door of the school where she studied, since that day her father went to pick her up and take her away from her. He never managed to get her daughter back.
Spy
During World War I, the Netherlands remained neutral. As a Dutch citizen, Zelle was able to cross national borders freely. To avoid battlefields, she traveled between France and the Netherlands via Spain and Britain, her movements inevitably attracting attention. During the war, Zelle was involved in what was described as a highly romantic-sexual relationship. intense with a Russian pilot serving with the French army, 23-year-old Captain Vadim Maslov, whom he called the love of his life. Maslov was part of the Russian expeditionary force of 50,000 sent to the Western Front in the spring of 1916.
In the summer of 1916, Maslov was shot down and seriously wounded during air combat with the Germans, losing his left eye, prompting Zelle to ask permission to visit his wounded lover at the field hospital where he was staying. she was near the front lines. As a citizen of a neutral country, Zelle would normally not be allowed near the front lines. Zelle was met by Deuxième Bureau agents who told her that she would only be allowed to see Maslov if she agreed to spy for France.
Before the war, Zelle had performed as Mata Hari several times before Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II and nominally a high-ranking German general on the Western Front. The Deuxième Bureau believed that he could obtain information by seducing the Crown Prince for military secrets. In fact, his involvement was minimal and it was German government propaganda that promoted the image of the Crown Prince as a great warrior, the worthy successor to the august Hohenzollern monarchs who had made to strong and powerful Prussia. They wanted to avoid publicizing that the man expected to be the next Kaiser was a playboy known for womanizing, partying, and indulging in alcohol, who spent other parts of his time intriguing with far-right politicians, with the intention of having his father declared insane and deposed.
Not realizing that the Crown Prince had little to do with the leadership of the 5th Army, the Deuxième Bureau offered Zelle a million francs if he could seduce him and provide France with good intelligence on German plans The fact that the Crown Prince, prior to 1914, had never commanded a unit larger than a regiment and was now supposedly in command of an army should have been a clue that his role in German decision-making was largely nominal. Zelle's contact with the Deuxième Bureau was Captain Georges Ladoux, who would later become one of his main accusers.
In November 1916, he was traveling on a steamer from Spain when his ship arrived at the British port of Falmouth. There she was arrested and taken to London, where she was questioned by Sir Basil Thomson, assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard in charge of counterintelligence. He gave an account of this in his 1922 book Queer People, saying that she eventually admitted to working for the Deuxième Bureau. Initially detained at the Cannon Street Police Station, she was released and stayed at the Savoy Hotel. A full transcript of the interview is in the National Archives of Great Britain and was broadcast, with Mata Hari played by Eleanor Bron, on the independent broadcaster LBC in 1980. It is unclear whether he lied on this occasion, believing that the story was made up of him. sound more intriguing, or if the French authorities were using it that way but didn't recognize it because of the embarrassment and international backlash it might cause.
In late 1916, Zelle traveled to Madrid, where he met with the German military attaché, Major Arnold Kalle, and asked if he could arrange a meeting with the Crown Prince. During this period, Zelle apparently offered to share secrets. French with Germany in exchange for money, although it is not yet clear if this was out of greed or an attempt to set up a meeting with Crown Prince Wilhelm.
In January 1917, Major Kalle transmitted radio messages to Berlin describing the useful activities of a German spy codenamed H-21, whose biography so closely matched Zelle's that it was evident that Agent H -21 could only be Mata Hari. The Deuxième Bureau intercepted the messages and, from the information they contained, identified H-21 as Mata Hari. The messages were encrypted with a code that German intelligence knew the French had already broken, suggesting that the messages were devised with the firm intention of exposing Zelle so that she would be arrested by the French.
General Walter Nicolai, the German army's chief IC (intelligence officer), was very upset that Mata Hari had not provided him with any intelligence worthy of the name, instead selling the Germans simple Parisian gossip about life of French politicians and generals and decided to terminate her employment by exposing her as a German spy to the French.
Judgment
In December 1916, the Second Office of the French Ministry of War allowed Mata Hari to obtain the names of six Belgian agents. Five were suspected of presenting false material and working for the Germans, while the sixth was suspected of being a double agent for Germany and France. Two weeks after Mata Hari had left Paris for Madrid, the Germans executed the double agent, while the other five continued their operations. This development served as proof to the Second Bureau that the names of the six spies had been communicated by Mata Hari to the Germans.
On February 13, 1917, Mata Hari was arrested in her room at the Hotel Elysée Palace on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. To save herself from her arrest, she excused herself saying that she would go clean up and change before going with them, but when she returned from the toilet she was completely naked and she offered the officers chocolates in a German uniform helmet. She was put on trial on July 24, charged with spying for Germany and consequently causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. Although French and British intelligence suspected that she was spying for Germany, neither could present definitive evidence against her. Supposedly, secret invisible ink was found in her room during the search, which was incriminating evidence at that time. She maintained that it was part of her makeup.
| A whore? Yes, but a traitor, never! |
| "Frase attributed to Mata Hari during the trial. |
Zelle's main interrogator, who interrogated her relentlessly, was Captain Pierre Bouchardon; he later went to try her at the trial. Bouchardon was able to establish that much of Mata Hari's personality was fabricated, and far from being a Javanese princess, Zelle was actually Dutch, which he was to use as evidence of her dubious character and dishonest in his judgement. Zelle confessed to Bouchardon that he had accepted 20,000 francs from a German diplomat in the Netherlands to spy on France, but insisted that he only passed on trivial information to the Germans as his allegiance was entirely to his adoptive nation, France. Meanwhile, Ladoux had been building a case against his former agent by presenting all of his activities in the worst possible light, even going so far as to become involved in evidence tampering.
Scapegoat
In 1917, France was badly shaken by the Great Mutinies of the French army in the spring of 1917 following the failure of the Nivelle offensive along with a large wave of attack, and at the time many believed that France could simply collapse as a result of war exhaustion. In July 1917, a new government under Georges Clemenceau had come to power, fully committed to winning the war. In this context, having a German spy to blame for everything that had gone wrong in the war so far was in the best interest of the French government, which made Mata Hari the perfect scapegoat, which explains why why the case against him received maximum publicity in the French press and led to his importance in the war being greatly exaggerated.
Canadian historian Wesley Wark stated in a 2014 interview that Mata Hari was never a major spy and had just made the scapegoat for French military failures he had nothing to do with, stating: 'They needed a scapegoat and she was a perfect target for this'. Similarly, British historian Julie Wheelwright stated: "He didn't really broadcast anything that you couldn't find in the newspapers in Spain." Wheelwright described Zelle as "...an independent woman, a divorcee, a citizen of a neutral country, a courtesan and a dancer, which made her a perfect scapegoat for the French, who were losing the war. She was like an example of what could happen if your morals were too loose".
Zelle wrote several letters to the Dutch ambassador in Paris, claiming his innocence. "My international connections are due to my work as a dancer, nothing more... Because I didn't really spy, it's terrible that I can't defend myself." The most terrible and heartbreaking moment for Mata Hari during the trial it occurred when her lover Maslov, deeply embittered over having lost an eye in combat, declined to testify for her, telling her that he did not care whether she was convicted or not. Zelle was reported to have fainted when she learned that Maslov had abandoned her.
His defense counsel, veteran international lawyer Édouard Clunet, faced impossible odds; he was denied permission to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses or to examine his own witnesses directly. Bouchardon used the very fact that Zelle was a woman as proof of her guilt, saying: "Unscrupulous, accustomed to making use of men, she is the kind of woman who was born to be a spy.";.
Mata Hari herself admitted under questioning that she took money to work as a German spy. Some historians argue that Mata Hari could have simply accepted money from the Germans without carrying out any espionage.At his trial, Zelle vehemently insisted that his sympathies lay with the Allies and declared his passionate love for France, his homeland. adoptive. In October 2001, a Dutch group, the Mata Hari Foundation, used documents released from MI5 (British counter-intelligence) files to call on the French government to exonerate Zelle, arguing that the MI5 files showed he was not guilty. of the charges of which she was convicted. A spokesperson for the Mata Hari Foundation argued that, at best, Zelle was a low-level spy who provided no secrets to either party, stating: "We believe there are enough doubts about the information file that was used to convict her to warrant the reopening of the case. Perhaps she was not entirely innocent, but it seems clear that she was not the master spy whose information sent thousands of soldiers to their deaths, as has been said.
Execution
Zelle was executed by firing squad of 12 French soldiers just before dawn on October 15, 1917. She was 41 years old. According to an eyewitness account by British journalist Henry Wales, she refused to wear the blindfold on her eyes and be tied to the post. She defiantly blew a firing squad kiss. Zelle has often been portrayed as a femme fatale, the dangerous and seductive woman who uses her sexuality to effortlessly manipulate men, but others see her differently: in the words of According to American historians Norman Polmer and Thomas Allen, she was "naive and easily deceived", a victim of men rather than a victimizer.
A 1934 The New Yorker article reported that at his execution he wore "an elegant Amazonian bespoke suit, specially made for the occasion and a new pair of white gloves", although another source indicates that she wore the same suit, low-cut blouse, and set of tricorne hats that had been chosen by her accusers for her to wear at trial, and that it remained the only clean, complete outfit she had in her possession. prison. Neither description matches the photographic evidence. Wales recorded her death, saying that after the burst of shots rang out, "slow, inert, she settled to her knees, her head always held high, and without the slightest change of expression on her face." she. For a split second she seemed to stagger there, on her knees, looking directly at those who had taken her life. He then fell backwards, bending her waist, her legs folded under her & # 34;. A non-commissioned officer approached her body, pulled out her revolver and shot her in the head to make sure she was dead.
Remains and French declassification of 2017
Mata Hari's body was not claimed by any family member and was consequently used for medical studies. His head was embalmed and kept in the Paris Anatomy Museum. In 2000, archivists discovered that it had disappeared, possibly as early as 1958, according to curator Roger Saban, when the museum had been relocated. It remains missing to this day. Records dating to 1918 show that the museum also he received the rest of the body, but none of the remains could be found later.
The sealed trial of Mata Hari and other related documents, totaling 1,275 pages, were declassified by the French military in 2017, one hundred years after his execution.
Controversy over his sentence
The most widespread thesis about Mata Hari is that, although he revealed some information about some German military movements, such as the night landing of some of the Kaiser's officers in Morocco, and that he communicated to the enemy movements of French troops that he knew about from the press itself from Madrid and Paris, it does not appear that Mata Hari was an important spy, despite the fact that she was accused by France of having been trained in a school in the Netherlands for that purpose. At that time, Mata Hari was more of a courtesan who accepted commissions of this type to maintain her expensive standard of living and later to be able to visit, in war territory, her beloved young woman wounded in combat. Those who have studied this character say that she actually took this work as a game, not being fully aware of the risk she represented.
The German Trap Hypothesis
A widely followed thesis is based on the fact that the Germans, upon deciding that Mata Hari was annoying, prepared her elimination at the hands of the enemy himself, setting a trap for French counterintelligence so that they would associate her as a German agent. The move was perfect: when the Germans sent Mata Hari a compromising message encrypted with an obsolete key, of which they were aware that their enemies already had the decryption method, but knowing that they were unaware of the German warning about this fact, They would cause, as it did, the authorities in Paris to believe without qualms in the veracity of all the intercepted information, thinking that the Germans had sent it in confidence, when in fact they had done so on purpose.
It is worth mentioning the new war intelligence scenario that this world conflict gave rise to. Numerous messages of this type were sent to confuse the true intentions of the enemy and the movement of troops. The struggle to get keys and be aware of the change in them also caused real headaches. The message spoke of a German agent, H21, who would go to Paris and extract $5,000 in payment for his services from Banque Comptoir d'Escompte. The coincidence of his return to Paris together with the arrival of the transfer of the bank funds, despite the fact that the money never reached his hands, and was actually payment for the services he had rendered to the company itself. France; In addition to this poisoned radio-telegram that was captured in the French capital by the radio antenna arranged in the Eiffel Tower, they served as the main evidence of Mata Hari's guilt.
The Legend
Died at age 41 in 1917, Mata Hari remains the stuff of legend. Despite her distance in time, few are her approaches to her person that clearly draw her as she really was. For some, an amoral woman who was willing to do anything to continue living in luxury, and for others, an unconscious woman who was the victim of difficult circumstances.
"I don't know if I will be remembered in the future, but if so, nobody should see me as a victim but rather as someone who never stopped fighting bravely and paid the price he had to pay," he came to say Mata Hari without even imagining that it would end up becoming a legend. In his novel The Spy (2016), Paulo Coelho delves into his life. Mata Hari has become an icon for facing the canons of her time and fighting to be an independent and free woman in a troubled world.
Pop Culture
- Mata Hari (1931), film directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Greta Garbo.
- The Spanish film The Queen of Chantecler (1962), starring Sara Montiel, includes a novel version of Mata Hari. It was interpreted by Greta Chi.
- Mata Hari (1976), song by Anne-Karine Strøm.
- Mata Hari (1985), film directed by Curtis Harrington and starring Sylvia Kristel.
- There is a graphical adventure for PC based on the life of Mata Hari and developed by the German company Cranberry Production GmbH.
- The spy (Editorial Planeta y Grijalbo, 2016), book by Paulo Coelho.
- Mata Hari (2016), television series that narrates his life.
- Mata Hari (1996-presentity), prominent soul precursor band in the Chilean musical scene.
- Episode 8 of the television series "The Adventures of the Young Indiana Jones" (1992), where the protagonist knows Mata Hari and has an affair with her, while being investigated by the French police.
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