In 1918 she was accused by the French of spying for Germany in World War I, found guilty and executed.

Her real name was Margaretha MacLeod, née Zelle. Mata Hari was a stage name. She was a dancer, a stripper, a courtesan, and yes, a spy. She was a Dutch citizen who managed to bed some of the richest and most powerful men in pre-WWI Europe.

Even at the very beginning of her life, it was clear that Margaretha Zelle would become someone extraordinary. From the early days of her childhood in northern Holland, she stood out: flamboyant, striking in appearance, bold, bright, and gifted in languages. One schoolmate compared her to an orchid among dandelions, contrasting her dark exotic looks with the fair skin and blond hair of most other Dutch children.

Born in 1876, she learned as a young girl that she could get what she wanted by pleasing men, starting with her doting father, Adam Zelle. Margaretha was her father’s overwhelming favorite, and he showered her with extravagant gifts. In 1889, however, Margaretha’s father abandoned the family and ran off with another woman. Her mother, Antje Zelle, died a couple years later, when Margaretha was a teen.

After her mother’s death, Margaretha—thoroughly spoiled and precociously sexual at age 14—was sent away to learn to be a teacher. At 16 she was expelled for having an affair with the married headmaster of the school. From there, she then moved to The Hague, a city...

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Mata Hari's True Story Remains a Mystery 100 Years After Her Death

Mata Hari (1876-1917), real name Gertrude Margarete Zelle. Dancer on French stage, executed as a spy by the French. Circa 1900. Bettmann / Getty Images

BY RAY CAVANAUGH

OCTOBER 13, 2017 12:00 PM EDT

She refused a blindfold and by some accounts even smiled at her executioners. Margaretha Zelle, a.k.a. “Mata Hari,” an exotic dancer and convicted spy, met her end at age 41 at the hands of a firing squad outside Paris 100 years ago on Oct. 15, 1917.

She’s been portrayed as a femme fatale archetype and one of history’s greatest spies, and her life has inspired films, musicals, a ballet and books, including Paulo Coelho’s recent The Spy: A Novel of Mata Hari.

However, some contend that — regarding military matters — she was little more than a gossip with a thing for officers on both sides of the WWI battlefront. In the view of Russell Warren Howe, author of Mata Hari: The True Story, “The legend far surpasses the woman.”

Born in 1876 in the Netherlands, she was the daughter of a once-prosperous hat merchant who went bankrupt. At age 18, she married an officer in the Dutch colonial army. Together they lived at his military post in Indonesia (then called the Dutch East Indies), where they had two children — one of whom died soon after birth — during their unhappy, mutually unfaithful, and at times physically abusive marriage.

Upon heading back to Europe in 1902, the couple separated and ultimately divorced. Migrating to Paris, the divorcee reinvented herself as a striptease dancer who claimed to be of Far Eastern descent. She called herself Mata Hari (“eye of the dawn” in the Malay language).

Starting in 1905, she captivated crowds in Europe’s cultural capitals. Her career lasted about a decade until she lost ground to younger and more athletic imitators. But she still possessed abundant charm and was fluent in several languages, and was able to find success as a courtesan, seducing the wealthy and powerful from multiple nations, including high-ranking government officials.

Because her home country remained neutral during World War I, she was allowed to cross borders with comparatively little hassle. However, her travels and lifestyle would attract attention: Before the War, her behavior might’ve met with mere moral disapproval. But during the War, it also elicited suspicion of espionage.

Among her lovers was Major Arnold Kalle, a German military attaché. Whether he began to regard her as a nuisance or a liability, he sought to dispose of her. So, using a code that he knew the French had already cracked, he transmitted a message easily identifying her as a spy.

Mata Hari was arrested in a luxury Paris hotel in February 1917, and her closed-door trial took place five months later. Though the prosecution blamed her for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers, no specific evidence or explanation was provided as to how she caused these fatalities.

In fact, “no one ever identified any specific defeat or leak of information that could be blamed on her,” wrote Pat Shipman in Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari, which described her legacy as a “rich mélange of myth and legend that still persist.”