This photo is colorized, but it is real.
She was born on August 7, 1876, in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, as Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. Although her ancestry was completely Dutch, she would later claim to have come from the Dutch East Indies, known today as Indonesia. At the age of 18, she went to the Dutch East Indies, answering a newspaper ad paid for by Dutch Colonial Army Captain Rudolf MacLeod, for a wife.
The marriage allowed Margaretha to move into upper-class society, but her half-Dutch, half-Scottish husband was an abusive alcoholic. Both of them were unfaithful, and it's not clear which one gave the other syphilis. But she passed the disease on to her son, Norman-John, who died at age 2; and her daughter, Louise, who didn't outlive her mother by long, dying in 1919.
Margaretha divorced Rudolf, studied Indonesian culture, and began professionally dancing in native costume, calling herself "Mata Hari," meaning "eye of the day" -- or "Sun." Rudolf kidnapped Jeanne, and, without the resources to fight it, she didn't.
By 1904, following in the footsteps of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, she became a star dancing in Paris. She wouldn't dance completely nude, because she was sensitive about her small breasts; but close, and, even for Paris, this was pretty wild. For the rest of the 1900s, she was a big star.
By 1912, she had been constantly imitated, and her novelty had worn off. The start of World War I took the men who would be watching her to the Western Front, and she left the stage for good in 1915. She got by as a courtesan, fooling around with rich (and sometimes powerful) men for money -- essentially, a high-class prostitute.
The Netherlands was neutral in the war, allowing her to travel Europe freely. This led to her affair with Captain Vadim Maslov, a Russian pilot serving with France. In 1916, he was shot down. She asked for permission to visit him at the military hospital. The military intelligence agency, Deuxième Bureau ("Second Bureau"), aware that she had performed before Germany's Crown Prince Wilhelm -- definitely on stage, and probably in bed as well -- offered to let her see Maslov if she would infiltrate Germany and spy for France.
Unfortunately for her, and for France, the Bureau had fallen for the Germans' propaganda about the would-be Kaiser Wilhelm III being a great military leader. He was, in fact, an alcoholic playboy, not unlike Margaretha's husband, and didn't have much to do with the German Army.
To make matters worse, she mishandled the assignment: In November 1916, she went to Madrid -- Spain was also neutral -- and met with a German major who was in contact with the Crown Prince, and offered them French military secrets. Whether she was greedy enough to betray France or simply using this as a ruse to fulfill her duty, in January 1917, the Bureau had intercepted a message from German intelligence. It was a setup: Having received nothing from Margaretha that they considered useful, the Germans sent their message, implicating her in having spied for them, in a code that they knew the French had already broken.
She was arrested in Paris on February 13, 1917. Her trial began on July 24, and she was accused of giving enough secrets to Germany to cause the deaths of over 50,000 soldiers. To put that in perspective: America lost its mind when we lost nearly 60,000 in Vietnam over a stretch of 8 years. So the French were talking about having lost 50,000, on the words of one woman, over a span of a few months.
Margaretha Zelle's mug shots. At age 40,
she was a far cry from the Mata Hari that she once was.
The evidence against her was ridiculously flimsy. Intelligence agents from France and Britain both testified that she had spied for Germany. They were men, and their word was taken over that of the woman who, perhaps apocryphally, claimed, "A harlot? Yes. But a traitoress? Never!"
But 1917 was a hard year. Russia was collapsing in revolution. Germany was winning the war, but running short of supplies at home, resulting in what was, in effect, a depression. And France had been shaken by the failure of the Nivelle Offensive, the Great Mutinies in their Army, and nationwide strikes. They were losing, and the people, as much as the government, wanted to know why.
Georges Clemenceau headed a new government, and it was decided that it was easier to blame one person than the entire country. And this one person was a woman, a loose one at that, and a foreigner. Easy. Like I said, France seemed to have learned little from the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s.
Just before dawn, on October 15, 1917, outside Paris in Vincennes, Margaretha Zelle was executed by a firing squad of 12 French soldiers. There are legends about her death that didn't hold up: She was wearing a low-cut blouse, in the hopes that the soldiers wouldn't execute a woman with big breasts (as I said, they weren't); she was going to claim to be pregnant, and it was forbidden to execute pregnant women in France, thus giving herself more time to find a way out (she made no such claim); and a former lover was going to come to her rescue in the nick of time (if any of her exes planned such a rescue, it was not attempted).
There is no final resting place for Mata Hari: No one claimed her formerly celebrated body, so it was used for medical research.
There is a statue of her in her hometown of Leeuwarden. She has been portrayed in several movies, including Jeanne Moreau in Mata Hari, Agent H21 in 1964; Zsa Zsa Gabor in Up the Front in 1972; Sylvia Kristel, also Dutch-turned-French, in Mata Hari in 1985; and Austrian actress Valerie Pachner in The King's Man in 2021.
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October 15, 1917 was a Monday. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a prominent historian and the son of another, was born on this day.
There was only one score on this historic day. Game 6 of the World Series was played at the Polo Grounds in New York. After the Chicago White Sox' Urban "Red" Faber and the New York Giants' Rube Benton matched 3 scoreless innings, the Sox' Eddie Collins led off the 4th, and hit a grounder to Henry "Heinie" Zimmerman at 3rd base. Collins took 2nd when the throw got past 1st baseman Walter Holke. Joe Jackson's fly to right field was dropped by Dave Robertson‚ and Collins went to 3rd.
When Oscar "Happy" Felsch hit one back to the pitcher‚ Collins broke for home. Benton threw to 3rd to catch Collins‚ and catcher Bill Rariden came up the line. But with Zimmerman in pursuit, Collins kept running, and slid home safely. Zimmerman was blamed for chasing the runner‚ but he shouldn't have been, because nobody was covering home plate, so he didn't have anybody to whom he could throw.
The Giants came back with 2 runs on Buck Herzog's triple in the 4th‚ but Faber, a future Hall-of-Famer, won his 3rd game of the Series 4-2, and the White Sox took the Series.
This turns out to be the last World Series won by a Chicago team for 88 years – partly due to the fault of at least 6 and possibly 7 White Sox "throwing" the Series 2 years later.
A letter signed by 24 members of the World Series Champion Chicago White Sox and manager Clarence "Pants" Rowland contains complaints concerning not receiving their full winners' share after beating the Giants. The written request, which will be discovered as a tattered document more than 40 years later in boxes stored at the Hall of Fame library, may explain the Black Sox' motivation for fixing the Fall Classic the 2 years later.
The last surviving member of the 1917 White Sox was right fielder Harry "Nemo" Leibold, who lived until 1977.
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