Last of two parts
In 1917 radio messages were intercepted about a possible German spy named H-21.
H-21 was Mati Hari.
That year she was again arrested in Paris and put on trial, accused of spying for Germany and consequently causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. During her trial she said “A harlot? Yes, but a traitor, never!” She denied the accusations. A British historian said that “She really did not pass on anything that you couldn’t find in the local newspapers in Spain.” By 1932 the head of military justice in France, a Colonel Lacroix, read the dossier and concluded that he had found “no palpable, tangible…proofs of her guilt.”
Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was executed by a firing squad of 12 French officers just before dawn October 15, 1917. She was not bound and refused a blindfold. She defiantly blew a kiss to the firing squad according to an eyewitness. It is in dispute that she wore a tailored suit and a pair of new white gloves.
Her body was not claimed by any family member and accordingly was used for medical study. Her head was embalmed and kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris and later it was discovered that it was gone possibly as early as 1954. Mati Hari’s sealed trial records were scheduled to be declassified by the French Army in 2017 exactly 100 years after her execution. My research could not find that this was done last year. The German government exculpated her in 1930.
In declassified and approved for release by the War Office Whitehall Court, S.W. and recounted in the 1986 book by journalist Russell Warren Howe, these following facts came to light. Remember facts, not government lies.
• Mati Hari’s only espionage effort was in Madrid and she was working for the French. She seduced a German military attaché there and spent three afternoons in bed with him. But the only information she got was stale or inaccurate.
• She did accept money from German intelligence. But all she ever gave in return were newspaper reports and gossip intended to get the military attaché to talk during their dalliance in Madrid. It was hardly worthy of eight criminal charges of espionage for which she was shot.
• At her secret trial, the French refused to let Mata Hari call two witnesses who could have proven her not guilty. Why? France was rife with anti-foreign sentiment and had recently suffered appalling military personnel losses due to inept generals. A scapegoat was wanted and a foreigner was the perfect set up for the French government.
• Mati Hari’s frame-up was deliberately abetted by the Germans who thought she had cheated them. She considered the payment her just due as compensation for property the Germans had seized early in the war. So they sent messages in a code they knew the French had broken suggesting that Mata Hari was one of their spies. French intelligence doctored the intercepts to make her appear even more guilty.
• The French lured Mata Hari into espionage with promises of high pay if she could seduce the German general who was commanding occupation forces in Belgium. She needed money for her lover who was the Russian captain, Captain Vadim Maslov.
Author Howe was shown the Mata Hari files at the Chateau de Vincennes, the very place where the 41-year-old was executed by firing squad. He was allowed to take notes on the file material, but was permitted to photocopy only some letters written by Mata Hari and some photographs.
One rightly may ask, why so much deception by the French and German governments during war? Because truth is the first to go during war. Because war is hell. Because war makes windowless coffins. Mati Hari died knowing she was innocent. It has taken 100 years for the rest of the world to know it.