Spy story
The details of Mata Hari’s espionage career remain sketchy, but it seems to have begun in the fall of 1915, when she was approached by Karl Kroemer, the honorary German consul in Amsterdam. Kroemer evidently considered her high-class contacts and neutral Dutch citizenship a valuable asset, so he offered her 20,000 francs to become a spy for the Kaiser. The cash-strapped dancer accepted the money—she later claimed she considered it payback for the assets seized from her a year earlier—but whether she actually took part in espionage is unclear. Whatever the case, the 39-year-old was assigned a German codename: “H 21.”
The details of Mata Hari’s espionage career remain sketchy, but it seems to have begun in the fall of 1915, when she was approached by Karl Kroemer, the honorary German consul in Amsterdam. Kroemer evidently considered her high-class contacts and neutral Dutch citizenship a valuable asset, so he offered her 20,000 francs to become a spy for the Kaiser. The cash-strapped dancer accepted the money—she later claimed she considered it payback for the assets seized from her a year earlier—but whether she actually took part in espionage is unclear. Whatever the case, the 39-year-old was assigned a German codename: “H 21.”
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