HISTORY: The Life Of Dutch Exotic Dancer Mata Hari; Convicted German Spy By Franch Court

The sensational Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan, Mata Haris was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I. Her birth name was Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, and she has better known by the stage name Mata Hari. She was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands on 7 August 1876 and died on 15 October 1917, in Vincennes, France.

She claimed that gets the name “Mata Hari” from India when she first came to Paris in 1905 and found fame as a performer of Asian-inspired dances. She soon began touring all over Europe, telling the story of how she was born in a sacred Indian temple and taught ancient dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari, meaning “eye of the day” in Malay or Sanskrit Hari means yellow which represent the sun, or shine or gold and Mata usually called to the goddess or to a mother which means she was the “mother of shine” as she mentions about the name she got it from India. So, the Malay Language is an Austronesian language officially spoken in Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore and Unofficially in East Timor and parts of Thailand.

Mata Hari captivated her audiences and was an overnight success from the debut of her act at the Musée Guimet (art museum) on 13 March 1905. She became the long-time mistress of the millionaire Lyon industrialist Émile Étienne Guimet, who had founded the Musée. She presented herself as a Javanese princess of priestly Hindu birth, pretending to have been immersed in the art of sacred Indian dance since childhood.

Before Mata Hari into her dance career took off famously, at the age of 19 she married a military captain based in the Dutch East Indies Rudolf MacLeod on July 11, 1895, with whom she had two children, a daughter, and a son though the couple’s son died in 1899 after a household worker in the Indies poisoned him for reasons that remain a mystery.

By the early 1900s, Mata Hari’s marriage had deteriorated as her husband was a heavy drunker and frequent rages over the attention his wife garnered from other officers. And her husband fled with their daughter, and Mata Hari moved to Paris. There, she became the mistress of a French diplomat who helped her hatch the idea of supporting herself as a dancer.

The love triangle with men on both sides of the conflict leads her convicted spy later on in her life. While in The Hague in 1915, she was approached by a German diplomat who offered her the modern-day equivalent of $61,000 to spy for Germany. Although she accepted the money and it would later be used against her in her espionage trial, she denied having done any actual spying for Germany and claimed she took the money as reimbursement for personal items that had been confiscated by Germany when the war began.

On 13 February 1917, Mata Hari was arrested in her room at the Hotel Elysée Palace on the Champs Elysées in Paris. She was put on trial on 24 July, accused of spying for Germany, and consequently causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers.

She was executed in a military trial conducted in July, she was accused of revealing details of the Allies’ new weapon, the tank, resulting in the deaths of thousands of soldiers. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and on October 15 she refused a blindfold and was shot to death by a firing squad at Vincennes.