Dancer, Spy, Scapegoat Trivia Quiz

Answer: Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born on August 7, 1876, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Her father, Adam Zelle, was a successful businessman who owned a hat shop. He was quite the character about town and called himself "The Baron". He doted on his only daughter Margaretha, and furnished her with many gifts. Margaretha, with her striking looks and wealthy family, was deemed "an orchid amongst the dandelions".

However, when she was 13 years old, tragedy struck. Adam Zelle lost his money in bad dealings in the stock market and declared bankruptcy. He then divorced his wife, moved to The Hague, and deserted the family. Shortly afterwards, Margaretha's mother died of heartbreak and the four children were sent off to various relatives.

Answer: A wife

Margaretha was living with an uncle in 1895, after having returned from a failed attempt to go to school to learn to be a kindergarten teacher. At that school, she had started an affair with the married headmaster, and was asked to leave. Bored in the home with her relative, she saw an advertisement for a wife in the newspaper in March of 1895.

She answered the ad and went to go meet Rudolf MacLeod in Amsterdam at a museum. MacLeod was a 38-year-old Captain in the Dutch Colonial Army, and home on leave from the West Indies. Upon meeting, he was instantly smitten with the tall, dark woman who was 20 years his junior. They married very quickly after meeting. However, it was a recipe for disaster as he was known to be a heavy drinker, violent, and jealous, which is never a good combination.

Answer: Eye of the Day (Sun)

Margaretha, her husband, and their infant son moved in 1897 to Dutch East India (Indonesia) where he was stationed. They lived in a variety of military outposts. She was miserable with the heat and the fact that her husband kept a variety of mistresses across the area. However, Margaretha was fascinated with the local culture. She loved the dances so much that she joined in at a local woman's dance group and learned the movements.

It was at this time of her life that "Mata Hari" was born. The name meant "Eye of the Day" or the sun. She privately began calling herself that and even wrote people back home about it. She also began dressing in local sarongs. In 1898, a daughter was born to the family.

Answer: Poisoning

Margaretha's life took a terrible turn in 1899 one night in Sumatra when both 2-year-old Norman and 1-year-old Louise Jeanne (Non) fell horribly ill overnight. They were crying, vomiting, and clutching their abdomens. Non survived the night but Norman did not live through it. There were two key theories as to what happened. The first is that a servant poisoned the children in retaliation for their father's cruelty to the staff. The other is that mercury killed them as it was being used to treat them for congenital syphilis contracted from their father.

The death of Norman ruined what little hope Margaretha had for her marriage. Rudolf blamed her as a bad mother, and Margaretha went into an emotional tail-spin. They moved back to Europe where Rudolf divorced her and took custody of Non. Margaretha never saw her again. This was when, she was to later state, that she stopped caring about "respectable" society.

Answer: Strip tease

In 1904, Margaretha, a single woman again, moved to Paris and determined to completely re-invent her persona and establish herself in society, one way or the other. She decided to fall back on what she had learned in the Orient. Her debut at the Musée Guimet on March 13, 1905, wasn't just a dance; it was a staged "religious event". She performed a strip dance where she gradually removed veils one by one as she "honored' the god Shiva. Even though this type of dance was illegal at the time, because she claimed it was a sacred temple ritual, the police didn't intervene, and the elite felt educated.

Thus began her rise through society. To have Mata Hari perform in one's drawing room was the ultimate sign of wealth and worldliness. Mata Hari took on multiple lovers as a dancer and courtesan. She especially enjoyed being with officers of all different military branches and ranks. As such, she was touring Europe's capitals. In Madrid, Vienna, and Berlin, she stayed in the finest hotel suites and was showered with jewels and flowers by dukes and generals.

Answer: Germany

When WWI broke out, Mata Hari was in Berlin, Germany. As a Dutch citizen, she was technically neutral, but her assets were frozen (including her prized furs), and she was stuck. In 1915, she was approached there by a German official and offered 20,000 francs to provide information on French movements. Mata Hari needed the money and seemed to think it would be another fun acting game. She was given the code name H-21 but apparently gave very little worthwhile information.

In 1916, she was back in Paris and Captain Georges Ladoux suspected her of spying for Germany. However, instead of arresting her, he offered her a spy role for France. She was offered an incredible 1 million francs and was sent off to seduce Germans to gain secrets. In Spain, she met the German military attaché, Major Arnold Kalle, who soon figured out she was a double agent. Mati Hari still did not seem to understand the problems she was encountering.

Answer: False

Vadim Maslov was a 21-year-old Russian pilot serving with the French Imperial Russian Expeditionary Force. In the spring of 1916 they met in the bar of the Grand Hotel in Paris, one of the most luxurious spots in the city. Although he was almost 20 years her junior, they fell madly in love. She claimed it was her first true love. Maslov was sent back to the front lines after that summer and was shot down over the Western Front. He suffered severe injuries, including the loss of sight in his left eye due to gas and shrapnel.

Desperate to be near him, Mata Hari took the spy money from France and spilled many secrets. This double agent role she took in order to find a way to Maslov would be her undoing.

Answer: 8 months

By 1917, France was suffering war weariness as casualties mounted and the economy declined. Spy fever was everywhere, as people suspected others as spying for other countries. It was in February of that year that Mata Hari was arrested for spying and became a convenient scapegoat for the cause. She was thrown in Saint-Lazare prison and was interrogated for 5 months while being kept in isolation.

She spent hours writing letters to the Dutch Ambassador, her lawyers, and her ungrateful lover, Vadim Maslov, who turned on her completely and called her a "dangerous adventuress". During this time, she became very close to Sister Leonide, and prayed with her often. Meanwhile, Mata Hari's health deteriorated rapidly. She suffered from heart palpitations and depression. The glamorous Mata Hari vanished; her hair turned gray, and she became thin and ghostly pale. She was found guilty in July of 1917, and sentenced to death. Her last day in prison would be in October of that year.

Answer: Firing squad

On October 15, 1917, Mata Hari was awoken in her cell, after which she demanded time to dress. She wore a fancy suit and high heeled shoes. She was driven to the outskirts of Paris, where a firing squad of 12 Zouave soldiers awaited. She refused a blindfold, insisting on looking her executioners in the eye. Mata Hari reportedly blew a kiss to the soldiers of the firing squad and to her lawyer, who was sobbing nearby. The command was given, and 11 shots rang out (one soldier reportedly fainted). She did not die instantly and a sergeant had to step forward and deliver a final pistol shot to the temple.

Because she had been labeled a traitor and her family was either dead, estranged, or shamed, no one claimed her body and it was sent to the Museum of Anatomy in Paris for use by medical students. Her head was embalmed and kept in the museum's collection of famous criminals. However, during an inventory in the year 2000, it was discovered that her head had disappeared, and, as of 2026, it is still gone in another mystery surrounding this woman.

Answer: Set of detailed scrapbooks

The museum, which is in the town of her birthplace, has a collection of Mata Hari's goods, including photos, letters and correspondence, movie placards of films that recounted her life, and some of her costumes. But the highlight of the group is a set of two large scrapbooks, often called her press books, that she kept throughout her career. She had asked that they be destroyed after her execution, but her wishes were not kept. They were handed over to Hollywood in the 1930s, and put in a vault during WWII. In 1992, the newly formed Mata Hari Foundation purchased the scrapbooks and they were brought back to the museum.

In 2017, on the 100th anniversary of her death, the French Ministry of Defense declassified her trial file and some of these documents are found at the museum. This includes the original telegrams, the H-21 messages, the transcripts of her interrogations at Saint-Lazare, and the heartbreaking final report of her execution. These documents essentially proved that while she did take money from the Germans, she likely never provided any information that actually harmed the French military. Fittingly, the museum's exhibit is titled "Mata Hari: The Myth and the Maiden."