Over 100 years ago, in 1917, a dancer was arrested and executed in Paris. Although she was known to many audiences as a great scandalous performer, there was so much more to her story than people realized.

Her stage name was Mata Hari. But she was actually born under the name Margaretha Zelle in the Netherlands in 1876.

At 18, she married an officer in the Dutch colonial army. The two of them lived in Malaysia for several years, where she learned about and fell in love with Indian and Asian-inspired dancing.

However, when she left her husband and moved to Paris to be a dancer in the early 1900s, she told audiences she was born in a sacred temple and had been taught the art of sacred Indian dances by a priestess.

This was when she began going by Mata Hari and started putting on exotic performances all around Europe.

After WWI had begun, Margaretha started having relationships with high-ranking military officers. In addition, she did a lot of traveling during the war, which raised suspicions that she was a spy.

In February 1917, Margaretha was arrested for espionage at a hotel in Paris and went to trial. There is evidence that Margaretha worked as a German spy.

Prosecutors claimed that Margaretha was responsible for the deaths of thousands of soldiers because of the information she had passed on as a spy.

Historians say that Margaretha was a ‘scapegoat’ for the French government, making it easy for everything that had gone wrong to be pinned on her.

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She was found guilty of espionage in July of 1917 and was executed by a firing squad on October 15th, 1917. According to an eyewitness, Margaretha refused to wear a blindfold during her execution.

Although she died over 100 years ago, Mata Hari’s legacy lives on. Her story has inspired many films and musicals. There was even an entire exhibition on her life at the Frisian Museum in her home country back in 2017.

Did you know who Mata Hari was before now?

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