A hunting accident in 1933 led to her leg being amputated, and this (along with her gender) prevented her being employed as a diplomat by the United States. Virginia Hall was an American: highly educated and a talented linguist, she travelled to Europe to study in France, Germany and Austria before finding a job in Warsaw in 1931.
So who was this daughter of a Dutch hat-maker, who was executed for espionage after a secret trial during the darkest days of World War One? Listen Now Virginia Hall More than 70 years after her death, Mata Hari is still a household name throughout the Western world. She was executed by a firing squad in October 1917. There is scant evidence that Mata Hari provided anything other than French society gossip to the Germans and many now consider her to have been used as a scapegoat for French wartime failures. She was quickly arrested and put on trial, accused of causing the deaths of thousands of French soldiers through her actions. In 1917, communications from Berlin were intercepted which revealed Mata Hari was a double-agent who was in fact also spying for the Germans. In particular, they wanted her to seduce Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of the Kaiser, in order to try and gather information.
After her Russian lover was shot down, she was told by the Deuxième Bureau (France’s intelligence agency) that she would only be permitted to travel to see him if she agreed to spy for France. Posing as a Javanese princess, she quickly became the mistress of millionaire industrialist Émile Étienne Guimet and as time went on, she effectively became a courtesan, sleeping with many high-profile, powerful men.įollowing the outbreak of the First World War, Mata Hari was allowed to travel freely as a Dutch citizen.
Penniless and alone, she began to work as an exotic dancer: Mata Hari was an overnight success. Born in the Netherlands, she married a Colonial Captain of the Dutch Army and spent time in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), before fleeing her abusive husband and ending up in Paris. One of, if not the most famous female spy of all time, Mata Hari was an exotic dancer and reportedly a German spy in World War One. With so-called Snoopers listening in on conversations in pubs, spies eavesdropping at bus stops, and government censoring throughout- the Ministry of Information was responsible for gathering information about public morale, and helping to ensure that no important military information fell into the wrong hands. Despite its Orwellian sounding name - the Ministry of Information was not something from a dystopian novel, but instead a government department that played a vital role in WWII.
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