Mata Hari's Tragic End

Mata Hari, at 34, a bit plump and approaching her last few years on stage. By 1910, Mata Hari had spawned various imitators of her erotic dance routines in Paris while touring Europe maintaining amorous liaisons with various high-ranking military officers, politicians, and royalty with strong influences in government and economy. By the start of WWI, she may have already engaged in espionage activities that remained contentious.  Prior to the war, she was generally considered a free-spirited artist, but as war progressed, she began to achieve notoriety as a dangerous seductress whose relationships could so easily lend themselves to espionage suspicions.

With an administration eager to win the war, one double agent for whom everything that went wrong with the war could be blamed was most convenient, making Mata Hari the perfect scapegoat, which explains why the case against her received maximum publicity in the French press, which was more than eager to hype her role in the war, and unwittingly created her legendary reputation as a dangerous seductress, a femme fatale.

In Feb 1917, with the flimsiest of evidence, the French government arrested Mata Hari in her room at the Hotel Elysée Palace in Paris, and put on trial in July, accused of spying for Germany, and causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. She was executed by firing squad in October, two months after turning 41. British reporter Henry Wales said to have witnessed the execution claimed she refused a blindfold, even blowing a kiss to her executioners. "Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her." A non-commissioned officer then walked up to her body, pulled out his revolver, and shot her in the head to make sure she was dead.