Angie serves up a story so piping hot it consumes the entire episode. Come join us as she regales us with the story of Mata Hari. Whatever you think you know of this WWI spy, this wasn’t it.
Angie serves up all the tea and she turns us all into fan girls as she shares her execution.
This episode pairs well with:
WWII’s Most Decorated Spy: Odette Samson
The Outrageous Sarah Bernhardt
Transcript:
Theresa: Hi, and welcome to the Unhinged History Podcast. The podcast where two crazy heads read history because what else are we going to do in this economy and join forces and then tell each other the story we’ve only recently learned. I’m host one, I’m Teresa, and that.
Angie: I’m Angie, I’m host two.
Theresa: And just before this call, Angie and I volley back and forth about whose story is going to do what and I threatened her with a great time.
Angie: No, she didn’t. She threatened me with more therapy. Tomato, tomato.
Theresa: You know, I’ve heard it both ways. I mean, I think I’m winning therapy. I’ve gotten to the point where my therapist has asked if I’ve seen Yellowstone referred to me as Beth Denton. I feel like I’m winning.
Angie: I feel like you’re winning also and I feel like you’re winning because I know your therapist sees a therapist because of you. And honestly, goals. I mean, who can ask for anything more?
Theresa: I’ve read my goals on a post-it note before every session.
Angie: See, I knew earlier that I’m planning ahead. I’m going to talk to them about this today. And if I don’t do a good job, they need to, like if I’ve done it right, they are also going to be in therapy today.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. Good job.
Angie: I’m proud of you. Way to manage that, way to handle your dreams. Good job.
Theresa: Yeah. I mean, you know, okay, so I said that I was going to torture you, but I think I might have tortured you next week because according to my spreadsheet of awesomeness. That’s what it’s called. That’s what it’s like. That’s what it’s like. Yeah.
Yeah. It proclaims it as your turn. And then you had said you might have a full episode, which I may not be able to torture you. You may have to just sit on the solid on how I’m going to undermine your mental health.
Speaker 4: My sanity. Yeah. My peace of mind. Oh, that’s gone. Wait, bye, bye. Yeah, I never, I’ll be honest. It was never here.
Angie: Now you’re just giving it a friend to play with. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I could just get, I could just get right into it, but you’re going to love this because I need you. Okay.
I could do either two things, one of two things. You can either take your headphones off and let me give my sources or I can give my sources without their title.
Theresa: I’ll take my headphones off because this feels better for me. Okay, bye.
Angie: Hi, guys. No, I was actually not going to cause any problems. I am just here to tell you my sources are the Frease Museum. PBS.org has an article on my person. There is a time.com article called Matahari, the True Story by Ray Cavanaugh from October of 2017. History.com has a, this day in history, October 15th, Matahari executed. The Guardian has a really great article from 2016 by Julia Wheelwright called Mother, Dancer, Wife, Spy, the Real Matahari. Flirting with Danger.
This is a historical documentary by Lucas Films that was on YouTube and another biography called Dancer, Lever, Spy and a little blurb from Georgetown University. So, I can tell if she can come back now. She can come back now. I’m bad. At this point, I have to wonder if she can read, but…
Theresa: I mean, I looked over at my second screen to see you mouth what I assume was you can put your headphones back on. That’s true.
Angie: But the whole time I was doing that, I was thinking there’s a couple of words in here that are really unmistakable. I wonder if she can read.
Theresa: Okay. So, because of the audio processing disorder, where if I’m not looking at you and we’re in public, I can’t hear what you’re saying. Like, I will look at my husband. He will say something and I will just be like, expand the tires in the wrench sack. And he’ll look at me and he’ll think that I’m messing with him and then he’ll repeat what he actually said and I’ll go, oh, yes, that makes a lot more sense. Absolutely not what you said. But for like years, he assumed that I was trolling him and just coming up with something that vaguely rhymed with what he said.
Angie: Okay, but like to be fair, you have been trolling him for years. So, like, it’s fair to assume that could have been one of the ways that you’ve been trolling him. Yeah.
Theresa: And I’m still paying for the last time I messed with him.
Angie: Well, these are things. That’s why I don’t, like, I do not play practical jokes on my husband at all because I know for a fact I will pay for them and he will make it. I will remember for life.
Theresa: So, I know I texted you this, but I might as well publicly embarrass myself by telling the listeners. Hubs and I trained karate together and he invaded my space during partner work. Just being playful, just being playful, just leaned in a little extra, a little closer than an opponent normally would.
And because I wanted to reinforce boundaries, I just reached forward, I just stretched my neck for it a little bit, grabbed a hold of his beard and bit down. Didn’t do it. Yeah, I do. Just bit.
Just let him know, like, hey, you’re in my space. And this man recoiled and left my mouth with a mouthful of hair. It felt like mouthful of pubes and it was in between my teeth and I was having a hard time.
Angie: And I don’t want to go home. And he’s watching me like…
Theresa: And like, dished him out in between my teeth and I’m like having a sensory overload moment. He’s laughing. My instructor’s dying. And then the next day, this man who had a longish beard sees a chunk missing because I don’t know what happened the night before. I guess I blacked out and he’s like, you know what I need to do?
I need to shorten it up. So he takes it down like several inches and then walks out of the bathroom with his face wrapped in a towel because he recognizes… He’s no longer what I recognize from the nose down. And so he comes at me like a bandito. Like he’s getting ready to tell me to empty the bank vaults. And when I’m like, drop the towel. And he does. And I’m like, I don’t know.
First time he looks younger, it looks better. I hate it’s a long thing to begin with, but now I don’t know who the hell you are. And you are? Yeah, it’s like, yeah. Yeah. And so now I get to walk around with this strange man in my house who is ever so familiar.
Angie: And claims that finds a marriage certificate, but still word out.
Theresa: Right. And so now I get to deal with all of that because this is, you know, sentenced its own punishment. You’ve done the work? Yeah. Yeah.
Angie: Honestly, I am so glad you got to retell the story in person because the text was hilarious, but watching your face is even funnier. So thank you for that. I appreciate you.
Theresa: I do what I can. Yeah. But anyway, your story now that you’ve… Yeah.
Angie: I’ve got a banger. I am going to tell you the story of Margarita Gertrudea Zell. Are you familiar with this name? No. I want to be. What century? We’re starting. We’re starting in the 19th century, but the bulk of it is going to be early 20th. Okay.
Okay. So our girl, she is born on October 7th, 1876. In Livarden, which is a city in the Netherlands. She’s the oldest child. I think I’m going to butcher her mother’s name, but I am sure going to try. And Jeet. I think that’s how it’s pronounced.
Theresa: Anyway, this checks for me.
Angie: If all the videos I watched are right, and Jeet. And Adam Zell. So for a good chunk of this, I am just going to call her Zell, because that’s the most straightforward, most pronounceable way to go. Papa is quite well off. He’s a really successful hat maker. And I’m going to be honest with you when I say that, no, or in my mind did I equate the idea with being a successful hat maker to the level of success that he was.
For whatever reason in my brain, it was like cute little old man in suspenders sitting behind his workbench that makes some money to bring home the bacon and then happily retires. And like he’s never rich and famous. But this guy makes it big.
Theresa: This guy is like Louis Vuitton. It’s like you start out making baseball gloves. Or is it baseball gloves that Louis Vuitton made? And he could wear baseball gloves. Is he the baseball gloves or saddles or something? That was coach that did saddles.
Angie: No, I think it was baseball gloves. We’ll have to do the little bit. I think that was right. Okay. We’ll let you know. So Papa is well off. Our girl is born and spends her childhood in luxury on one of the most posh streets in her city. She has three brothers.
Things are going great until they don’t. It’s around 1888. Zells between 12 and 13 years old. Good old dad can no longer keep up their expensive life. So he declares bankruptcy and bounces like this is most sources say he moved in with his brother in the Hague. One source suggests that maybe he just left for another woman. But given that more than one source says he moved with his brother. I’m going to go that that’s probably what happened. But maybe the woman showed up later. I don’t know.
Theresa: Yeah, I mean it could be with brother until I really hashed out a side piece and then right, right.
Angie: Needless to say he bounces and 12 year old Zell and her brothers are cramped into this little upstairs apartment with their mom and leave on. This of course results in a separation and a divorce from mom and dad and then not too long after her beloved mother dies of tuberculosis at only 49. Yeah, so we’re a young teen. Life is not great.
Up to this point. Our girl’s L. She is precocious outgoing. She’s very a very confident child who has spent her life so far at the best schools around. She’s learning to dance. She’s learning to play the piano and she speaks French. Her teachers would never accuse her of being an obedient and well behaved child. So honestly good for her.
Theresa: Okay, so this is an Odette Samson is what I’m hearing.
Angie: I’m thinking somewhere between Odette Samson and a young Marie Antoinette. Like I just kind of do what I want and I get by because I’m charming. Sort of thing. Right.
That’s going to come back later. Her doing as she pleases. Once her mom dies, the kids, they’re sort of all shuffled around other family members.
Some sources say that Zell was sent to her godfathers, but the museum where I acquired the bulk of my story says she ends up with her uncle, which at the end of the day, I guess you could be a godfather and an uncle. Maybe they just didn’t all equate the same way in their research.
Theresa: But I mean, I’ve heard recently of a human whose godmother was her older sister who was like 13, 14 years older than her.
Angie: So, you know, it doesn’t matter. Like the relationship doesn’t matter. He very well could have been both. So she’s living with him and his wife in a town called Sneak. She basically stopped school at 14, but at 15, her guardians decide that she should be in training to teach kindergarten. So she goes to this like a college for kindergarten teachers is the only way I understood it. I don’t want to say it’s like a finishing school or a prep school. The way that it was described was like, that’s exactly what you’re going there to do.
It doesn’t teach anything else but how to be a teacher, which is kind of cool. Right. Okay. You could say that she was gorgeous. You could say that she was probably one of the prettiest things you ever saw. A schoolmate would call her an orchid among dandelions. She was dark-eyed and had a dark complexion. And don’t panic because this school year’s spent for her lives rather shortly. She’s suspended after just one year. Okay.
Theresa: Wait a minute. That was weird. It went from she is absolutely gorgeous. She is a rose among thorns and she’s got a school. How are those two thoughts related?
Angie: Because her beauty plays into it. The rumor is she was caught in what the Freest Museum would say was an amorous state with the school headmaster. Oh, that would do it. Right. So she’s gorgeous.
She catches his eye and she loves the attention. At least at this point. So, I mean, there’s that. And you know what? Girl always seems to know what she wants.
So get it, I guess. There’s a couple more years go by. She’s bored. She’s kind of feeling like life is a little bit meaningless. She’s 18 years old and living in the Hague. And she sees an ad in the paper. An officer is on leave from the Dutch East Indies and he is looking for a woman to marry.
Theresa: This is kind of one of those lonely articles. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep.
Angie: And it’s basically like, you know, career soldier looking for a wife and she’s like, oh, that sounds lovely.
Theresa: Look at her. I love uniforms.
Angie: Oh my gosh, you couldn’t be more accurate. So the Freeze Museum has this to say, on a drizzly Sunday in March, she meets Rudolph McLeod known as John in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum. He is 39 years old, a hardened professional soldier of aristocratic and very likely Scottish descent.
As a captain in the Royal Dutch East Indies Army, he is temporarily on sick leave in the Netherlands. The couple doesn’t waste any time. Six days later, they are engaged. And then on July 11th of 1895, they’re married at City Hall in Amsterdam.
Theresa: Okay. That was no time wasted. This is 90 day fiance on crack. Yes.
Angie: And he is several, several years older than her. Right. Significant timeframe. And so far, this probably sounds a lot like the beginning of a lot of stories that we have.
The here’s where it starts to go in a different direction. It’s now 1897, just a couple of years after they marry. I’m assuming he’s on leave this whole time that they’re in these two years before they go back to the Dutch East Indies, but there’s no sources that suggested anything different. So that’s what I’m going to go with. It’s 1897. They make their way back to his post in the Dutch East Indies, which if you’re curious, this is the area that mostly makes up modern day Indonesia.
Think places like Sumatra, Java, Borneo, these, these territories, which would ultimately declare independence on July 17th of 1945. So I think that’s pretty cool. So her husband, McLeod, is a prominent officer there. They’ve got the large house, the servants, you know, the whole gig and she’s given birth to their first child, a sweet boy named Norman James. It’s not too long after they arrive that she gives birth to their daughter, Louise Jean, whom they nicknamed Nonna or Nani. So they’ve got the young family, right? Like big house, the dream, the exotic dream of all people, I think at this time. It’s a big time frame.
At least anybody that’s seen it have an exotic dream. Okay, but the bad news. Her husband is a walking red flag. He’s got a temper and he is a man that is used to giving orders and then being followed.
And he is like always in debt and he is also incredibly abusive towards her. Good. Yeah, all the things, right?
Our girl is stunning and she knows how to work a man and she likes to flirt, which of course he hates. So needless to say their marriage is full of infidelity on both sides, but it was McLeod who would bring home… wait for it… Sip-a-list.
Theresa: Sip-a-list.
Angie: Yeah. Okay. …that he likely contracted from what we would call a concubine mistress, that sort of thing. Evidently at that time and place it was… I don’t want to say it was the in thing to do, but it was not unheard of for soldiers of European descent to have multiple marriages because that was like locally acceptable there. But regardless, this is a mistress, right?
Right. So he brings home Sip-a-list from a mistress and this is the part where the story just kind of goes south. It gets a little questionable. The kids are either born with Sip-a-list because of hereditary passing it down or an angry servant poisons them.
McLeod has no shortage of enemies. I think it’s kind of more accepted now that it was the Sip-a-list, but there’s still a lot of belief that it was poison. Regardless of the source, the children are sick, everybody’s sick, and supposedly everyone’s treated for Sip-a-list, which the doctors of the time, their only care available was… Mercury? …heredotuses of mercury. Ah! Yes.
Theresa: I knew it’s too much about this.
Angie: It’s, you know, you’re just too comfortable with Sip-a-list.
Theresa: I don’t know if I like that statement.
Angie: It was delightful. Thank you. We just know a lot about Sip-a-list, you know? History brings up Sip-a-list a lot. It’s not us. It’s history. Okay, fair. I like the cop-out. It just is what it is. And we just happen to pick stories that have Sip-a-list. What does that say about our algorithm?
Theresa: Norman, this sweet boy, he’s about two at this time.
Angie: Sip-a-list? Yeah. Yeah. I know a lot of things about my algorithms, and I just am really thankful that I have a history, a search history, but at the same time, I’m honestly the one that’s really, the request that I’ve made is that my oldest son is the one that clears my search history when I die, specifically so I can screw with him in my later years. That’s my client. Norman, the sweet little guy, he’s about two at this time, and he probably has the most severe case, and it is treated as such. And sadly, he dies of mercury poisoning. This is heartbreaking. I can’t even begin to fathom this because also she is trying to care for her infant daughter, right?
Like, to just go through a loss like that is unfathomable to me. But our girl, Zell, she’s in this exotic location, and she gets to spend time among the locals. She’s learning their customs. She’s learning their language. She’s learning all kinds of things.
So she does have a couple things going for her. It’s at this point that the Freese Museum points out that, quote, the socialite life among the high-ranking military is going well. As a charming officer’s wife, she accompanies John at dinners, parties, and dances. She is more in her element there than at home as a mother. Marguerita is eloquent, lively, and theatrical, and has her own ambitions.
For example, she shines in the leading role of an amateur musical that receives good reviews there. But just shortly before everyone started showing signs of the sickness, McLeod had retired and they moved to a much more isolated village, and she hates it. There is no one around. She is bored to death, and I think he probably chose that on purpose. After the little one dies, they are completely inconsolable, but they also have to care for their baby, and they decide that maybe Indonesia is not the place to be anymore. So they board the boat back to the Netherlands. It’s March 19th when they get on the boat and they return home, and then just about six months later on August 30th, 1902, McLeod and Zell get divorced. The loss of their son was kind of the last nail in the… In November of 1903, she has this quote where she says, I can only tell you that out of passion and madness, he almost killed me with a bread knife on a Sunday afternoon, and that I owe my life to a chair that fell over and gave me time to find the door and get help.
He was told by doctors that he suffered from what one doctor called tropical frenzy and other doctors just called fade-ism. So, lovely. Yeah, he’s there, right? Okay, so she gets custody in the divorce of their daughter, and she loves this. However, he won’t pay alimony, and at this time and place, it’s nearly impossible for a divorced woman to provide for herself or a child for that matter. But she won’t go back to McLeod because I feel like for obvious reasons. At this point, she realizes, though, that she has to give her daughter to him. She had stated at one point that while he was a terrible and abusive husband, he was a good father, and she knew that her daughter would be well cared for. So, to ensure that her daughter can be given the things that you need in this life, like, you know, food, shelter, clothing, things like that, she gives her back to McLeod. She’s got no family for the most part. She’s penniless, and she’s only 26 years old. She’s on the street because despite the work of her lawyers, it is impossible to seize the pension of someone who has served in the Dutch East Indies. And I’m not sure why.
I’d be interested to know, but it seems like there’s some legal reasons why you can’t touch their pension. So, our girl does what every girl dreams of and goes to Paris saying, I thought all women who ran away from their husbands went to Paris.
Theresa: Kind of love that. I mean, honestly. Right.
Angie: I mean, for a while, she does every decent thing that she can think of from teaching piano and German lessons to being a lady’s maid. According to Georgetown University, she also does these performances on horseback like horseback shows.
I don’t know if that’s part of the circus or whatever that is, but I only just learned that and I now have questions. And she does all of these things with the hope that one day she can actually afford to keep her daughter. And she says she’s going to continue to do all the decent things until she simply can’t anymore. Her hope is that she can maintain a respectable life so that she could be a good mother.
Like that’s at the core of it. That’s what she’s hoping. In slightly less respectable moments, she sits for portraits by the artist of Monarcha. And doing so secures her theater contacts, which is going to matter in just a little bit. Right before she sits for portraiture for the first time, she sends a letter to a relative.
I believe this relative is either a cousin of her or a cousin of McLeod’s, but he’s been working as the middleman since their divorce. So he’s trying to help. Either way, he seems ill.
It seems that way. And in this letter, she basically says, if McLeod doesn’t hold up his end of their arrangements, which to this point he hasn’t, shocking, she basically says it won’t be her fault when his name gets dragged through the mud because she takes up less than respectable job of modeling. It’s in this letter that she also says, quote, I’m tired of fighting against my life and I want one of two things, either not me with me and to be a decent mother or I’m going to live as I’m so wonderfully offered here. She is tired of trying to know a bell.
And around this time, she does go back to the Netherlands. She’s desperate. She does want to be a mother and she has no money. So she’s still struggling. She’s still trying. And this is when she realizes she’s probably going to have to resort to prostitution. It’s at this point that her what’s left of her family leave leave her high and dry. So she heads back to Paris.
Back in Paris, she picks herself up by her bootstraps, uses all of her charm and knowledge that she’s gained over the years and she creates this amazing and mesmerizing persona and begins to perform this exotic dance and rather erotic dancer team under the name of Mata Hari.
Theresa: Oh my gosh.
Angie: Yep, this way I couldn’t. I couldn’t share my sources. Um, so Mata Hari means I have the dawn in the Malay language of the people she adored in Indonesia. She did dance for a short time under the name of Lady Gresham of Cloud, but that didn’t last long and I’ll tell you why in just a second. So she creates these Indian temple dances and she performs them passionately.
It’s got everything the Paris of 1905 wants. It’s mysterious. It’s exotic.
It’s sexy as hell and people eat it up. She tells her adoring fans that she’s a temple priestess’s daughter who died in childbirth and she was raised among the gods. She builds this like larger-than-life character and the public cannot get enough of her. Fun side note, I did not know until reading about her. Entertainers of this time were known to create these like alter personas and build these really remarkable lives. And it was generally accepted and loved by the fans even though they knew it was complete malarkey. But they were here for it, like dazzle us with your story. The fantastic, we know you were born three blocks over but it’s fine.
Theresa: Don’t let a lie get in the way of a good story. Exactly, right?
Angie: So they’re eating her stories up and she changes a little bit to it here and there. The basic gist is she was born in the temple to a priestess, a priestess dies in childbirth. She’s raised in the temple learning all the sacred things, right? And she does all this with the help of a man called Emile Gomet. It’s when she starts working with him that she takes on the name Matahari, which she has said in a letter to, I believe it was a cousin years earlier, that one day she would like to dance under that name.
And I thought, oh, that’s funny, you were like manifesting for yourself, good for you. Emile Eating Gomet was, according to a lovely with PE article that I read, because I was just kind of curious about him, a French industrialist, travelist and connoisseur. He was an important collector of artifacts related to, quote, Oriental religion and Asian arts. Gomet is the founder of the Musée Gomet and he is basically where she gets all of her costume pieces. It was, in fact, it would be at the Musée Gomet where her first big performance would be celebrated and like the who’s who of Paris are there. She, at this point, is basically performing what we would know as a striptease. She wears this almost, her costume pieces are like almost translucent. They’re very flowy. They’re very sensual. And for the most part, at least in the beginning, all of the pieces are authentic from Gomet’s collection. Like he basically hands her everything, these gorgeous headdresses, the whole thing because he’s just, this is the best idea we’ve ever had.
Let’s go for it. And I’m a rich collector with nothing better to do, right? So, like I said, these pieces, they’re very sheer and she slowly removes them piece by piece. And even at this time in Parisian history, this would not have been allowed, but she said, quote, excuse me, she said that she was only reenacting the sacred temple dances that the priestesses would do. So I guess it’s allowed in the name of authentic history and performance.
Theresa: Okay, so she’s like, this is religious freedom. I guess.
Angie: That’s pretty much how I took it. It doesn’t take long for her to just explode and she is performing on every stage in Europe from private shows to sold out theaters.
Theresa: Meanwhile, what’s ex-husband saying? Because I have a feeling this has got to be deeply humiliating.
Angie: I’m sure it is. I was really curious about him. Typically, I think when we have a story where the woman leaves the husband, like I never really care what happens to him afterwards, but I’m really interested in his perspective. I know that he remarries a few times and I know that he never gives his side of the deal. I think it’s because of her actions and he was mortified. That’s the way I understand it, but I don’t have any letters from him that say how he felt, but I’m 100% sure he was not happy.
I do believe that there were times where she was able to have her daughter, but I think she spent the bulk of her life with her father. It kind of makes the most sense. No, I lost my notes. She is traveling all over the place and it does not take her long to gain a long list of powerful, wealthy men that are willing to lavish gifts upon her. Around this time is when she would also begin her career as a courtesan, but I wanted to take a moment to dispel 100 years of rumors because, let’s be honest, there are tons about Motari that are not accurate. Kind of like Maria Laveau’s story, we’re told one story, but it is 100% not that story.
Kind of on the same line as that. I feel like Motari is often played off like this vixen for sex, right? But she’s not really into it.
Like we previously thought. She’s not out there trying to get them in so she can have all these magnificent love affairs and notches on the bed post. There is a letter that she previously writes to one of her cousins, and in one of them she points out that her relationship with the cloud was so bad that she pretty much loathed sex, which is sad, but she knew what she could do with it and would occasionally dabble if needed for one reason or another. One source suggested that she would only resort to prostitution or the pain for it if her daughter needed something, but I don’t feel like that’s 100% true because her lifestyle was over the top. There are lovers that are paying for castles for her. There are men that just want to be in the room with her.
I think it varies. But I’m not here to judge, like girlfriend, get it. Like do what you’re doing. Whatever you feel about it, I’m here to support it.
Good for you. So one of her gentlemen, one of the things that her gentlemen callers, they start to get really interesting, right? Because we’re leading up to the Warriors. And she is hot. She is sexy. She’s multilingual. She can speak fluent German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Malay. And she is dating men from all over the board. And she loves a man in uniform. She doesn’t care what uniform you have on.
Theresa: I didn’t realize just how right I had it with the uniform comment.
Angie: I know. I was like, oh girl, you could not be more right. Girl loves the uniform. Her peak years, she’d received 10,000 francs, which is like 37,000 euros for one show. Her names used for things like cigarettes, liquors, all sorts of products. By 1907, she’s a millionaire. It doesn’t last long because she spends it as fast as she can make it. But she is everything that every wealthy man wants. She’s even in Vogue, which I don’t know why, but did you know that Vogue was founded in 1892? I don’t know why I didn’t know how old Vogue was, but I was like dang, 1892.
Theresa: I didn’t know either. It doesn’t surprise me, but I’m just kind of like, okay.
Angie: Yeah, I guess I thought it was the thing that came out of the 40s, but no, 1892.
Speaker 4: So she was even in Vogue.
Angie: It doesn’t matter where her lovers or her suitors come from. She may not like sex, but she loves to flirt. And the men form a queue. Like, where do I stand in line? She is fond of high-ranking officers and the nobles as well, because why not? Now, despite the fact that her career alone could pay the bills if she could stop spending all the money on lavish things, these men are all too happy to finance her extravagant lifestyle. One of her bows is a French baker called Rousseau. He rents a castle for her, but that’s not enough, so he also rents her a villa that comes with a carriage and riding horses and staffs. She dates a Rothschild at one point.
Like, all the things. Do they say Rothschild? I did. Yes, a Rothschild. I don’t know what that is. Rothschild.
Another jilted lover gives her 300 staff. I’m stuck on Rothschild. Rothschild.
I can’t say it wrong now. Rothschild. Another jilted lover gives her 300,000 Reichs marks, which is just under a million euros when they split ways. When they split ways, he’s like, oh, you also need money. That’s a subtle bit. Hey, whatever.
Theresa: You know, I think I just needed to do breakups differently.
Angie: We have been doing it wrong. That’s the way I’m understanding it. What have we learned over the last few weeks? We could have been being paid monthly for life. But we can’t forget that we’re on the eve of war, right? So it’s June of 1914. Matahari is asked to perform a show in Berlin and she can’t pass it up. Lately, times haven’t been great for her. As younger and, dare I say, perhaps even prettier girls have figured out her story and made it their own. And she is all too happy to take this show in Berlin.
So that’s where she goes. But the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Francis Ferdinand is assassinated on June 28, 1914 by a Bosnian serve. And on July 28th of 1914, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. This is inconvenient and sad. But here we are. She keeps on doing Matahari stuff. And then on August 1st, Germany declares war on Russia and she’s like, Well, I should probably get back to Paris now. But then on August 3rd, Germany declares war on France and so on and so forth in the biggest bar fight in history.
And I know I shouldn’t make light of World War, but every time I think of the opening of World War I, I cannot help but think of a giant bar fight. You know where we are. Right? And our girl, she’s Dutch, right? So she carries what’s going to be called a neutral passport. So boom, she goes home to the Hague because forget all of you people. I’d like to go home. And she could have stayed and made a nice, quiet life for herself. But what part of the story would make you think you did that?
Theresa: I mean, well-behaved women sell to make history.
Angie: Exactly. So, Seidbart, and I think this is pretty interesting, the Freestine Museum tells us, Because she was in Berlin when the First World War breaks out and there she is declared a citizen of the French enemy by the Germans. I don’t really know what that means. I’ve been thinking about it all day. But what I do know is the Germans freeze her, the bank frees her assets, and to her great indignation, Germany also confiscates her belongings, including her precious fur coats.
Oh, this is going to matter like a lot in just a little bit. Now, it’s wartime and everywhere she goes, she attracts the looks of powerful men, and this is no different, right? Only this time they are looking at the fact that she carries a Dutch passport, so she can basically move freely around Europe as she pleases, and she is also multilingual. So, people aren’t at this time in war. They’re not really interested in seeing her shows, so she is super dependent on her wealthy friends for her upkeep.
So we kind of have to keep that in mind. The British, French, and German intelligence communities are all paying close attention to her for any reason they want. On the eve of May 16th, Monta Harry gets called on by the German Council Cramer in the hog. Now, excuse me, the Hague, he in other sources is listed as one of her boyfriends.
I’m not entirely sure if he really is only because the spelling of the names are just a little too variant to really confirm he is the same man as some of the other sources suggest. But either way, he calls on her, and I can only imagine he’s got flowers in hand, and he believes that she is soon going to Paris, and he wondered if he could recruit her as a spy. So he asks. He wants her to collect all sorts of intelligence and gives her the code name Agent H21. He offers her 20,000 francs, which is about 50,000 euros, and she takes them, even though she thinks that’s not nearly enough. But she never plans to do any spy work for the Germans because remember, they already took all her stuff, and she’s just seeing this as payment for their earlier actions.
And I personally live for this type of audacity, like as it turns out, no, I’m not going to do any work for you, but I am going to keep all the money that you hand, because do you remember a couple years ago when you inconvenienced me by freezing my bank accounts and taking my furs? Thank you. No, but she does, in fact, go back to Paris. On the boat on her way back, it stops and docks in an English port town, and the British intelligence question everyone on board. The comments about her are as follows. She speaks French, English, Italian, Dutch, and probably German, handsome, bull type of woman, well and fashionably dressed, not above suspicion, and she should be refused permission to return to the UK. Honestly, I want to live in a way that I am viewed as not above suspicion.
Theresa: I mean, we’ve said living above approach, but not living above suspicion is the opposite side of that coin, but more fun.
Angie: Right? When she finally makes it back to Paris, she falls right back into her delightful little life of being well kept. But the French want her to, but the thing is she has fallen in love, like for real real, like the love of her life kind of love, with a young Russian officer called Vladimir Demoslav. I’m not clear how they met or when they met, but what I do know is he is wounded in the eye, but that doesn’t stop her from falling head over heels for this guy, and when he proposes, she excitedly accepts.
And then he sent, like, immediately back to the front line. So she wants two things, money to start a nice life with this new bow, this love of her life, and she wants to be near him. So she is looking for safe passage to the front. So she asks a former fling of hers for help, and he sends her to the immigration office because she needs some sort of special permit to be in the area that’s near the front line, and even to go there.
So this immigration office, it’s located at 282 Boulevard Saint-Germain, which also happens to be where the headquarters of the French intelligence service is located. Surprise, surprise. Shocking, I know. Here, Montahari meets Captain Lado, the head of French intelligence service, and he knows all about her from the British. He’s been waiting for a chance to meet her. In fact, he’s been shadowing her for a month. Lado is stoked when she walks through the door, and he gives her exactly what she wants, the travel documents. Even though there is no proof at all, surveillance or otherwise, he thinks that she’s spying for the Germans, and he’s going to catch her in the act.
Like, that’s what he thinks. When she returns from the front, he pounces, and he makes her think he also wants to recruit her as a French spy working in the Belgian area. And she’s like, well, for a million francs, yeah, I’ll do it. And for a penny and for a pound. Right?
That’d be like 2.2 million euros today. So at this point, I think they’re happily playing each other. She’s told she will receive more instructions from Lado, and when the mission is complete, payment will be handed to her. So she goes to work.
And this is where everything just takes a dive. She can’t complete her original mission because instructions are lacking. This is where it gets a little bit wonky because here is where the legend and the lies and the truth meet. So we’re still kind of muddling through that. It hasn’t been that long since the French unsealed her documents.
I don’t remember what year it was, but it’s only been like maybe in the last 20, 30 years. And people are still trudging through everything to figure out the truth of it. But basically, she is lacking instructions on what to do. And so she’s going to do something and she thinks that it would be useful if she goes to Madrid and seduces a one major call. He’s what the freezing regime would call a dreaded German. She says that she herself is a German spy and passes him some harmless information, and then he kind of spills the beans to her. And then she approaches the French colonel, De Vings, who she informs that she is a French spy, and she tells him whatever information she obtains from call after flirting with… after flirting and a couple of afternoons in bed with him. And then she asks him… excuse me, I have this a little wonky, but the colonel that she meets, the French colonel, after she is done flirting and having her little fling with the German major, she asks the French colonel if he’ll pass all this information on to the French intelligence community. And then, because Lado has yet to contact her, she does what I would consider the dumbest thing ever. She sends letters to Lado via the regular mail, which I realize at the time may not have seemed dumb, but like it’s spycraft 101 now, right? Don’t do that. And from what I understand, they’re uncoded.
So, shouldn’t do great. But the German major that she’s seduced, he, at the same time, he also sends some telegrams to the German intelligence offices, and he gives up what he thinks is H21. And he then tells them the information that she’s passed on, and he asks her how he’s to pay her.
Like, he asks his handler, how am I to pay her? Now, these telegrams, they are intercepted and deciphered by the French. Sources are a little conflicted here, but the clearest way I see it is that he used codes he knew the French had already broke, and they quickly figure out that H21 is our girl, Montahari. She’s caught, and she doesn’t even know it yet. Now, all of a sudden, her contacts, both in Germany and France, have like fallen off the planet.
Nobody responds to anything. She’s suspicious, and she wants to get back to the Netherlands. But just three days later, once the ink dried on her warrant, Ladoe arrests her on suspicion of espionage for the Germans. She goes through several months in jail, and at least ten interrogations, when she finally comes out and says, yeah, I took the money from the Germans, and yeah, my code name was H21, but I never spied for them.
Like, they owed me the money, and doesn’t my work and my letters prove that I was loyal to France the whole time? But there’s this council-martial chief investigator called Captain Bouchardon, and he, from the get, she’s guilty. Like, she has no chance.
He sees no reason to even really give her a trial, but, you know, here we are. It’s pretty clear why, at this moment in time, France has suffered a devastating blow, could have been up to 50,000 soldiers in like one fell swoop. And France is looking for an out.
They’re looking to make someone the bad guy, someone they can blame, and so, truth doesn’t really matter here. Montahari is the perfect target. On July 4th, Margarita Groutroudia-McLeod, Zell, or Montahari, is officially charged with pro-German espionage activities. On behalf of the French state, Captain Bouchardon summons her to appear in court. The French accuse her of maintaining covert contact with the Germans, gathering intelligence, passing information. Her travel is considered very suspicious to them, and her very dubious and rather public contacts with some high-ranking Germans are not helping.
They can’t prove that she actually ever spies or gives intel to the Germans, but under military law, simply maintaining any contact with the enemy is guilt. Right? Like, she really had no choice here. Right.
Like, no chance. The Freist Museum says, quote, the French court martial passes the death sentence. The seven judges ruled swiftly and mercilessly.
Despite the meager evidence, the judges found her guilty on all counts. Her accusers smugly speak of arguably the greatest female spy of our century. On October 15, 1917, she is taken out to the firing range in her finest clothes. She refuses to be blindfolded or tied to the post. She says goodbye to the two nuns who have been caring for her, and she looks defiantly at the shooters. Sources say she even blows them a kiss.
Whoa! They fire, and Montahari is dead. The officer, overseeing the execution, exclaim, by God the lady knows how to die. George Ladoe, her handler for French intelligence, was later arrested and tried himself as a double agent. Holy cow!
Theresa: I didn’t see that coming.
Angie: I know. He was not found guilty, basically gets a slap on the hand, and lives till 1933. I genuinely believe he set her up from the beginning to take the fall for whatever he was doing. Whether he genuinely was not a double agent and just saw the writing on the wall that they needed some sort of fall guy and a woman of loose morals would be the perfect one. Or he really was up to something, and he needed someone to take the blame for his actions so he could continue with whatever he was doing. She was the perfect target. And that is the story of Montahari. Wow! I told you, I had a little bit of everything, including syphilis and tuberculosis.
Theresa: She had kind of been on the list, but every time I’d see her, I’d say, you know what, I need to do a deep dive on her. Same. Same.
Angie: And I have a topic that I really want to do, but I’m not done reading all my stuff on them yet. And something came across one of my dashboards late last week, and the husband was like, so I’m actually kind of shocked you guys haven’t done in Montahari. And I was like, oh my gosh, I did the Montahari of the East?
Why have I not done the original? Right. So I have spent every waking hour obsessing over this woman for the last week. Time well spent, I would say. I think so. I learned a lot. I didn’t… I don’t think we’ve really talked about World War I at all. And… Francis Peggy McGovern.
Theresa: Was World War I?
Angie: I guess I just need to say like, not a ton. I think we get a lot of World War II, right? I think we had a couple from World War II that were also in World War I. Yeah. But I guess I don’t know if I just am stuck on World War II.
Theresa: I think it’s a couple of things, right? Like I think media kind of came into its own. Oh yeah. I think there were just… there are just more sources. It’s fresher in history. So I think that that’s why we get a lot of World War II. There’s just a lot out there, right? I’m sure if we dug, we could get to World War I, but it would require digging as opposed to just looking below the surface. I’m here for a good deep dig.
Angie: It was a lot of fun to learn about her and like learn about just the way society saw her as opposed to being totally against this erotic, exotic dance that she was doing. They welcomed it wholeheartedly and then immediately, once off it, just tossed her out the window. Like that’s so unfair.
You loved her and treated her so brilliantly for so long and then we’re like, ah, actually, bye. You know, but that checks though. It really, really does. I guess I was impressed because it was just another point where humanity proves we’ve always been the same.
Theresa: Yeah, like cancel culture is not new.
Angie: Oh, no, no. And they, I think, dragged her through the mud given the opportunity. They blamed her for the death of those 50,000 soldiers without question. And she didn’t have any information on them to begin with. So I really, really, I don’t have the historical background on George Lido to give an honest answer, but my heart answer says he was a double agent. But the war is over by the time he gets, you know, he gets arrested. So it doesn’t really matter after the fact.
Theresa: Well, honestly, thank you for bringing her up because it might be another 50 episodes before I get around to her.
Angie: You’re welcome. You just think the fact that I haven’t finished this book yet and have to keep taking side quests.
Theresa: I’m here for it. I truly am. That’s the story of Montahari. Well, if you’ve enjoyed the story of Montahari and you’re thinking, oh, holy cow, what is Tresa going to torture Angie with next week when she takes a full hour? Great review. Subscribe. Send this to your favorite would be a great double agent because we all have that one person in our life who is trustworthy to a point.
Angie: And if you don’t, maybe it’s you. Yeah, or maybe make a friend.
Theresa: There you go. Maybe your mom was right. And on that note, goodbye.
Theresa: Bye.
Unhinged History 
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