Mata Hari in Color: Colorized Pictures of the World's Most Famous Spy

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Perhaps few people in history have used their feminine charms as skillfully as Margareta Zelle, better known as the dancer Mata Hari, did. During the First World War, she was engaged in espionage activities in favor of Germany, which is why a French court later sentenced her to death.

Margareta was born in the Netherlands into a family of a successful businessman. However, when his father's business went bankrupt, the family also fell apart - Margareta's mother died, and her father sent the girl to another city to study. At the age of 18, the girl married the 39-year-old military man Rudolph McLeod, having met him through an ad. Having signed, they left for the island of Java (then the island was in the possession of the Netherlands), where the couple had two children. The marriage was unhappy: Rudolph was an alcoholic, behaved aggressively and openly cheated on his wife, so at some point Margareta left him for another Dutch officer.

It was during this period that Margareta began to intensively study Indonesian traditions and especially dances, and at the same time in one of her letters to Holland she first mentioned her stage name "Mata Hari", which is translated from the local language as "sun".

At some point, Margareta returned to her ex-husband for the sake of the children, but one day the children became very ill - they even suspected that someone had poisoned them - and Margareta's son died in terrible agony.

After this terrible incident, the couple returned to the Netherlands and divorced. And after a while, Rudolph took away from Margaret the right to see her daughter. Her daughter died at the age of 21, and Margareta was never able to see her before.

Finding herself completely without any support, Margareta went to Paris and began to earn money there as a circus rider and "oriental style" dancer under the name Mata Hari. For 1905, such dances were perceived shocking - by the end of her act, Margareta sometimes remained almost completely naked. In addition, she deliberately wrote fables about herself, stirring up interest in her person, telling that she was an exotic princess, that she was brought up in the East and that she knew all oriental dances from childhood.

During the First World War, French counterintelligence began to suspect Mata Hari of espionage: she often communicated with high-ranking military and politicians in France and Germany, and no less often traveled through neighboring countries, where there was a strong German station. Upon learning of the suspicions, Mata Hari herself appeared in the French special services and offered them her services. Six months later, she was offered to transfer some data in Madrid - and it was there that the suspicions of Mata Hari's espionage were confirmed.

When Margareta returned home to Paris, she was arrested and accused of spying for the enemy during wartime. She was charged with giving the enemy information that led to the deaths of several divisions of soldiers, and sentenced to death. Attempts by the lawyer to rescue her were futile. Today, most historians are inclined to believe that the harm from Mata Hari's actions as a scout is greatly exaggerated - most likely, the main reason for her death was that the representatives of the French elite did not want to disclose their connections with her. However, documents from the trial of Mata Hari are still classified.

A lot of black and white photographs of Margareta Zelle have come down to us, especially in the image of Mata Hari. Olga Shirnina, working under the nickname Klimbim, painstakingly transforms black-and-white historical photographs into color photographs. Not being a professional retoucher, she nevertheless has already colorized a fairly large number of old photographs, which has won herself the fame of a talented color artist. And although most of her work is photographs of Russia, she also brought color to old photographs of Mata Hari. That is why we can now imagine more vividly and clearly what the world's most famous spy looked like.

Other works by Olga Shirnina can be viewed in our selection "Came to life photographs".