Mata Hari legend

Press, 9 January 1982, Page 14

Mata Hari legend

More than 60 years after she was shot by a firing squad, Mata Hari is a target again — this time as a tourist attraction in her home town. A statue of the celebrated Dutch spy has been drawing television crews here from all over Europe, and continental visitors galore have been coming in for a look. The people-of Leeuwarden are inordinately proud of Mata Hari, and they regard ‘‘our daughter” as a “sweet Leeuwarden maiden.” Leeuwarden's director of tourism, George Kooijman, says that the house on Grote Kerkstraat where she was 'born has undergone restoration and is being used as “The Mata Hari Museum.”

The statue showing Mata Hari as a young girl in a sexv dancing pose stands in front of her home, a narrow gabled house overlooking a canal.

According to city hall records, the famous femme fatal was born in this North Friesland province town on August 7, 1876, with the name Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, the daughter of a local hat maker. She became the subject of some 30 books, hundreds of magazine articles and two motion pictures. „ x In one of them Greta Garbo depicted her as a dancer, courtesan, doubleagent and the toast of Paris nightlife before, at age 41, the French executed her on the morning of October 15, 1917. “Let me say that Leeuwarden's official view on Mata Hari.” explains a straight-

faced Kooijman, “is that all of those stories about her are not true. We prefer to believe that the alleged events in her life were more the byproducts of her own imagination. “Novelists and other writers unfortunately helped her ignoble image along by fabricating all kinds of fantastic inferences about her

exploits as a spy for both Germany and France.” Locally referred to with affection here as M’greet, Mata .Hari came by her name after she made her debut as an exotic dancer .in Paris. Adopting the Indonesian words, “Eye of the Day” (Mata Hari), she used that to bill herself while circuiting the cabarets of Europe. The choreography she per-

formed, much of it daringly in the near nude to show off her perfect shape, was based on Indonesian folk dances which she picked up while living in the Dutch East Indies.

M’greet, after attending school in Utrecht, took, her first job as a schoolteacher in Amsterdam, but at the age of 18 she answered a matrimonial ad ip a newspaper and became a mail-order bride.

Her husband, 20 years older than her, was Captain Rudolph MacLeod of the Netherlands Colonial Dutch Army, with whom she had two children in Java before the marriage broke up in 1902. Once she got back to the Netherlands, virtually broke, she began dancing. Contrary to what Leeuwarden city officials prefer to believe, French sources maintain that as Agent H-21, the Dutch dancer served as a spy for Germany and was successful in worming out of French officers the secret plans of a major allied offensive.

When the drive was launched. German generals were thoroughly prepared to meet it, with the result that thousands of French troops were consequently slaughtered in the futile action.

By

NINO LO BELLO

from Leeuwarden

Tried in court-martial and found guilty, Mata Hari was sentenced to death.

Newspaper accounts at the time say she showed remarkable composure at Vincennes on the morning she was shot by refusing to have her eyes blindfolded and blowing a kiss at the 12 riflemen as they discharged their guns into her.

Nonsense, says DutchAmerican author Sam Waagenaar who spent 30 years tracking down the details of Mata Hari’s crazyquilt life. His detective work, endorsed by Leeuwarden's city fathers, uncovered the fact that although Mata Hari had accepted money from the Germans to engage in espionage, she never did any actual spying. Then, without being aware of how she was implicating herself, the woman fantasised to some male friends (“clients,” if you will) about being a double-agent. The French preferred to believe the harlot-spy and her admitted treacherous intrigues and put her up against the wall. Whatever the truth about Mata Hari, she remains nonetheless Leeuwarden’s pride and joy, though there was a nucleus of local citizenry which refused to turn out for the statue’s unvieling.