Treacherous Women - Sex, temptation and betrayal (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Page B

demanded that, as a Japanese soldier, she should be executed by firing squad. The court rejected her demand, however, and on 25 March 1948, she was led outside where her head was put on a wooden block. As had happened to countless thousands of Chinese people at the hands of the Japanese, she was beheaded with a sword.
    Yoshiko Kawashima was executed under her Chinese name, Jin Bihui.

Mata Hari
     
     
     
     
    As was customary, the detachment made as much noise as they could as they walked along the corridor to the condemned woman’s cell. It was preferable for her to be awake when they arrived, rather than be startled into consciousness with the knowledge that they had come for her. For, she had not known the date of the execution. The authorities considered it inhumane to make the condemned prisoner aware of the date of his or her demise.
    However, in spite of the stamping of their feet on the cold stone floor, Mata Hari was not awake that morning of 15 October 1917, as they approached the cell. The previous night’s sedative had not worn off and she had to be stirred from her sleep. Captain Pierre Bouchardon, the man who had interrogated her so many times, told her to be brave and informed her that her request for clemency had been rejected by the President of the Republic. The time had come for her execution. ‘It’s not possible!’ she said disbelievingly while two nuns who had been with her during the months she had spent in prison tried to comfort her. Calming down, she turned to one of the nuns. ‘Don’t be afraid, sister,’ she said, ‘I shall know how to die.’
    She bravely held her head high as she walked out onto the site of her execution, refusing a blindfold when it was offered. Twelve soldiers facing her, nervously took aim and as they did so, extraordinarily, she blew a kiss at them. The order to fire was given and twelve shots rang out. She fell to the ground, a bullet through the heart that had loved so much. An officer walked over to her and, as was the custom, delivered the coup de grace – a single bullet in the side of her head. Mata Hari, dancer, courtesan and spy, was dead.
    She had been born Margaretha Zelle in 1876 in Leewarden in the Netherlands, the second child of a successful hat manufacturer, Adam Zelle and Antje van der Meulen. Her three siblings were all boys and their unusually dark-skinned, dark-eyed and black-haired sister was known to them as M’greet. She stood out in a family whose colouring was generally fair and blonde and it was suggested that she must have had Jewish or even Javanese blood. M’greet played on these exotic looks, inventing fantasies with which she would regale her schoolfriends. She was popular with both teachers and pupils and was bright, showing a particular facility for languages.
    Everything changed for the Zelle family when M’greet was thirteen. Her father had made some injudicious investments on the stockmarket and was declared bankrupt. Suddenly, they were forced to move from their comfortable house in a good area to a small, shabby home in one of the poorer sections. Adam Zelle went to Amsterdam to try to re-build his fortune, leaving Antje to bring up the children alone. It was hard for her and she became became depressed and fell ill. She tragically died two years later, when M’greet was fifteen.
    Adam Zelle did not want to look after the children and, instead, distributed them amongst other family members and friends, M’greet being sent to lodge with her godfather in the small Dutch town of Sneek.
    Aged fifteen, she was very tall for the time – five feet ten inches, far taller than the average Dutchman, making it difficult for her to find a likely candidate for marriage so that she could escape from her dependency on her godfather and his family. It was decided, instead, that she should train to be a kindergarten teacher. She was sent to train in Leyde in a school run by a man called Wybrandus Haanstra. Not only was she not a very good