The Dancer Doomed as a Spy

In the early hours of 15 October 1917, a guard entered Mata Hari’s prison cell and awoke her.

Her time had come.  

She arose, donned her black stockings, high heels and a velvet cloak lined with fur.

‘I am ready,’ she announced. 

The guards whisked her off to the outskirts of Paris. Twelve French officers with rifles awaited her. 

She was led into a field and placed against a wooden stake. 

Offered a white cloth to wear as a blindfold, Mata Hari refused, demurring: ‘Must I wear that?’ 

She stared at her firing squad as a priest, nuns, and her lawyer backed away. 

The officers fired a volley of shots, ending the life of the 20th century’s most famous spy. 

Over the last 100 years, the Dutch dancer and courtesan has been revered as the ultimate femme fatale — the seductive, glamorous exotic dancer who spied for the Germans during the Great War and caused the deaths of thousands of allied soldiers. 

An Impoverished single mother, Margaretha MacLeod began dancing professionally in Paris in 1905. ‘I wanted to live like a colourful butterfly in the sun,’ she said. 

Mata Hari became an instant success. ‘I never could dance well,’ she later admitted. ‘People came to see me because I was the first who dared to show myself naked.’ 

She toured Europe, sharing the exotic story of how she had been taught ancient dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari. She packed venues from Russia to France. 

The facts regarding her espionage activities remain obscure. What is undisputed is her dalliances with a catalogue of lovers from various nationalities raised suspicions. 

According to some accounts, an honorary German consul offered to pay her for whatever information she could obtain about the allies. Suspecting her duplicity, the French arrested her. 

Mata Hari maintained that she had only given outdated information to the German consul. ‘A courtesan, I admit it,’ she said. ‘A spy, never!’ 

Tellingly, the German government publicly exculpated her in 1930. In 2017 France released documents relating to Mata Hari, leading many to believe that she had been a scapegoat of French officials looking to blame someone for the country’s setbacks in the war.