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The execution of Dutch exotic dancer Mara Hari, a World War I spy, happened on this day in 1917.
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Who was Mata Hari?
Mata Hari, whose real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, was a Dutch dancer and courtesan born on August 7, 1876, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. She became famous for her exotic and sensual dance performances in Paris during the early 20th century.
Was Mata Hari really a spy?
The extent of Mata Hari's espionage activities remains a subject of debate among historians. She was accused of being a spy for both the French and German sides during World War I. While she admitted to passing information to the French, the evidence against her was circumstantial, and some believe she may have been a scapegoat or a pawn in a larger intelligence game.
Did Mata Hari work for the French or the Germans during the war?
Mata Hari was accused of working as a double agent. She initially worked for the Germans, but she later claimed to be working for the French as well. The exact nature of her activities and her loyalty remain unclear.
How was Mata Hari captured and what happened to her?
Mata Hari was arrested in Paris in February 1917. She was accused of espionage and passing information to the Germans. After a trial, she was found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad.
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What event triggered the start of World War I?
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by a Bosnian Serb nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914, served as the trigger event that led to a chain reaction of diplomatic tensions and military actions, ultimately escalating into a global conflict.
Which countries were involved in the initial stages of World War I?
The major powers involved in the early stages of World War I were Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire (Central Powers) against Serbia, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom (Allied Powers).
How did World War I end?
World War I officially ended with the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne on November 11, 1918. This armistice led to the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front and eventually paved the way for the Treaty of Versailles, which formally concluded the war in 1919.
The Paris Peace Conference, also known as the Versailles Peace Conference, opens to draw up the treaties formally ending World War I. It happened on this day in 1919.
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Why was the Versaille's peace conference called?
The conference was the formal meeting of the victorious Allies after the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the Central Powers (the German empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria).
What were the results of the Versailles Peace conference?
Its major decisions were the creation of the League of Nations, the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as "mandates" (mainly to Britain and France), the imposition of reparations upon Germany, and the drawing of new national boundaries to reflect ethnic boundaries more closely.
Was the Versailles Peace Conference successful?
The Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany while failing to resolve the underlying issues that had led to war in the first place. Economic distress and resentment would help fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany, eventually leading to World War II.
After Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination of Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a series of diplomatic failures transformed a relatively inconsequential tragedy into the catalyst for two large Alliances of world powers to go to war in the largest conflict the world had ever seen. On this day, after 20 million deaths, World War I ends.
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How did World War I start?
Although many nations were involved in the onset of the first World War, many scholars say tensions had been on the rise throughout Europe for years before World War I actually broke out. The spark that set off World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by Serbian nationalists struggling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Who was involved in World War I?
On one side, Britain, France, Italy, the Russian Empire, Serbia, Japan, and the United States formed the Allied powers, while Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, The German Empire, and the Ottoman Empire formed the Central powers.
Initially dubbed “The Great War”, World War I was the first series of interrelated conflicts between world powers to reach a near global scale. Nine million people were killed in combat alone, while millions more civilians died as the effects of war spread across the world.
Why Was World War I Called "The War To End All Wars"?
World War I came to an end shortly after the U.S. deployed troops in Western Europe, leading Germany to become overpowered and forced to sign an armistice agreement with the Allied powers.
The agreement, known as the Treaty of Versailles was signed, leaders of the U.S., Great Britain and France met in Versailles to decide next steps following the call to end fighting. Germany, Austria and Hungary were not invited, and Germany was forced to pay reparations for the war.
It is bitterly ironic to note that World War I became known retrospectively as “the war to end all wars” in an acknowledgment of the futility of the scale of destruction and loss of life. Sadly just two decades later, another World War began that would be even more bloody and involve more countries.
As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.
As a young married civilian, British poet Robert Graves describes his mental state after World War I. "Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me," he wrote in Goodbye to All That, his wartime biography. "Strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed."
Graves continued to suffer flashbacks and panic attacks for ten years. He felt he was not a hero but the victim of a senseless killing machine. Few traumatized soldiers had Graves' poetic power to portray what they had experienced and say goodbye.
Been through worse
"The birds that sing best, the cat eats first," was not a witty saying my grandmother or mother occasionally mouthed. It was the attitude with which adults met children after 1945.
A father traumatized by war and imprisonment observes his daughter eating one slice of dry bread during the time of food stamps so she can "properly" enjoy the second one with the few sausages she was allotted in a joyful, playfully staged indulgence. As soon as she finishes the first slice, the father grabs the treat and eats it.
To the crying girl he says, "You ate the first slice dry, you can just about eat a second. That's life, I've been through much worse!"
Behind such scenes, which have been reported to me several times, is the envy of inwardly impaired people for the capacity for happiness. And the jealousy of someone else's naive desire and confidence to still believe in a mini-drama of pleasure.
A fear of adults
Traumatized parents make their own experiences of suffering a core principle of education. They steel their children against their own past and pass this off as preparation for the future.
The power of sensory impressions is almost limitless for a child. The world appears to a child exactly what these impressions convey. The people in their world are the only ones who exist. So if a child is brought up surrounded by stories of trauma, their childhood is snatched away.
Born in 1941, I was convinced for a long time that all children are like that, that they all experience childhood the way I did. I believed that my childhood was quintessentially childlike — not feeling conditioned by time. Gradually, I came to realize that my childhood was much more deeply marked by the war than I knew.
If a child is brought up surrounded by stories of trauma, their childhood is snatched away.
For a long time, I thought that children shared a basic feeling: To them adults were something like joyless giants who had no idea what it meant to have fun. Today — and my experience as a psychoanalyst may have contributed to this — I am sure that this conviction was influenced by history.
My belief was founded on the observation that people around me were destroyed, that my fears of adults was justified, and that my experience of adults not having a clue about children's needs was realistic. So it made sense to hide joy from them as much as possible.
War damages survivors' abilities to relax and enjoy themselves, which in turn steals the next generation the possibility of a happy childhood.
Traumatized parents cannot let their children grow undisturbed. They prepare them with subtle admonitions, overt pressure and personal examples to anticipate and adjust to evils. Patients born in the postwar period talk of fathers who were absent, who were "never there, even when they were there."
They describe unhappy, grumpily conformist, neighbor-oriented parents, churchgoers who didn't seem to believe what they preached, who thought highly of conformity and high achievements but couldn't convey to their children what it was all for.
Observations of severely traumatized people indicate that nonstop work is the best means of warding off tormenting memories and numbing feelings of inner emptiness. People who work do not think inappropriate thoughts. These personality changes were so ubiquitous after 1945 that they did not attract much attention.
During and after World War II, German children grew up in a vacuum of values filled by educated bourgeois or religious traditions. Too much was expected of children: To heal the wounds of their parents and to compensate for their mental limitations.
Parents were so preoccupied with survival and material reconstruction that they focused on caring for their children physically. Otherwise, they wanted to know them or talk to them as little as possible. Children were a nuisance when they took up time for such useless things as play or fun.
Children worried the parents because they stood for emotional diversity, vulnerability and openness, qualities which aroused envy and signaled a reality that the parents had lost through mental injuries and unconscious guilt complexes.
Memories of fathers
Doomsaying is as false as its opposite. There were families who were able to preserve love and empathy and draw strength from the carefree nature of their children. I myself have no memories of my father; he lies in a soldier's grave 90 kilometers south of Kyiv.
I did not consciously experience the loss, but felt the lack more often while growing up without understanding it. I owe my reasonable mental stability to the wisdom and energy of my mother. When in my psychoanalytic work I met traumatized fathers in the memories of their daughters and sons, I often wondered what it would have been like if my father had survived the war. But such gaps cannot be filled by fantasies.
My mother never let another man into her life.
My mother never let another man into her life after her six-year marriage. A brother two years older than me and I showed the way to modernity for the necessity-driven matriarchy. We made sure that telephones and TV sets came into the household, stayed under our mother's wing while we studied, and didn't move out until we got married, which in my case coincided with a dropout life in Italy.
Youth stolen
There, in an olive garden, I once met a melancholic man who could have been my father and told me his life story. He had been captured as a soldier in North Africa at the age of 19 and summarized his story thus: La Guerra mi ha rubato la gioventù ... the war stole my youth.
For the children of the traumatized, it does not make much difference whether their parents suffered psychological limitations in a just or a criminal war. Extreme situations such as fear of death, witnessing life-threatening injuries, hunger, thirst, dirt and cold damage the survivors' abilities to relax and enjoy themselves. Thus, a shadow falls on the next generations.
It is one of the cruel truths about complex organisms that it is much faster and easier to damage them than to heal them. This is similarly true for a society. It is easy to arouse hatred, to set groups against each other, but it takes a lot of effort, time and strength to go the other way.
Every hour of war is one too many. It not only costs lives and destroys cities, it also poisons souls and contributes to the emotional coldness that all murderers possess.
*The author works as an author and psychoanalyst in Munich. His book on trauma in families (Er hat nie darüber geredet. Das Trauma des Krieges und die Folgen für die Familie) was published in 2008.
From Saudi Arabia to Iran, Moscow to Washington and beyond, the rising global tensions over the Syrian war could explode in unpredictable ways.
Some strategic games are too complex to be readily modeled, and when we see such games in the real world that's exactly when we should be the most worried. That's my immediate reaction to the situation in Syria and environs.
Consider the distinct yet interrelated clashes going on. Not only did the U.S. strike early Saturday at Syria's chemical weapons facilities after the regime used such weapons against its citizens in Douma. Tensions between Israel and Iran have been escalating. It seems that Israel recently bombed Syria to limit that country's support of Iran-backed Hezbollah and to send a signal to Iran. There has also been talk that Hezbollah concentrations in Lebanon will lead to another conflict there. The situation in Gaza has heated up again, with Israeli fire against Palestinian demonstrators leading to significant casualties. As a sideshow to these struggles, U.S. President Donald Trump declined to certify that Iran was in compliance with its nuclear accord and may ditch the deal altogether. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu's government faces significant corruption charges.
The situation between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been worsening, and their proxy war in Yemen has assumed greater significance. Yemeni rebels have been firing missiles into Saudi Arabia, and a big hit may eventually get through the missile shield. Saudi Arabia has recently undergone a major shift in power, seeing some mix of a revolution, internal coup and crackdown on dissent.
Other related stories involve a regionally active and untrustworthy Turkish regime, Saudi displeasure at the shift of Qatar into Iran's orbit, and the possibility that Trump will use a Middle East conflict either to try to show he is tough with Russia or to distract attention from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. By the way, the U.S. is in the midst of restructuring its National Security Council, probably in a more hawkish direction, and there is no confirmed secretary of state. Toss in the recent Russian use of a nerve agent for an attempted assassination in the U.K.
Some historical events are relatively easy to model with game theory: the Cuban Missile Crisis, many of the Cold War proxy wars, the crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons. In those conflicts, the number of relevant parties is small and each typically has some degree of internal cohesion.
To find a situation comparable to the Middle East today, with so many involved countries, and so many interrelationships between internal and external political issues, one has to go back to the First World War, not an entirely comforting thought.
The situation right before that war had many distinct yet related moving parts, including the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the imperialist scramble for colonies, the prior Balkan Wars, a rising Germany seeking parity or superiority with Great Britain, an unstable alliance system, an unworkable Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the complex internal politics of Russia, which eventually led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
Chain reactions can cause small events to cascade into big changes
What do we learn from the history of that time? Well, even if the chance of war was high by early 1914, it was far from obvious that the Central Powers' attack on France, Belgium and Russia would be set off by a political assassination in the Balkans.
Nonetheless, insufficiently complex situations, chain reactions can cause small events to cascade into big changes. In World War I, one goal behind the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to break off parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a new Yugoslavia. The empire responded by making some demands on Serbia, which were not heeded, a declaration of war followed, and the alliance system activated broader conflicts across Europe.
If you don't quite follow how a single assassination, which was not even seen as so important the day it occurred, triggered the death of so many millions, and the destruction of so much of Europe, that is exactly the point. When there is no clear way for observers to model the situation, a single bad event can take on a very large significance and for reasons that are not entirely explicable.
In today's Middle East, we also have a broadly festering situation across multiple fronts, with many smaller players, lots of internal political struggles and unstable political units, and commitments from some major external powers, including the U.S., Russia, Iran and Turkey. I find that an uncomfortably close analogy with 1914.
Optimists such as Steven Pinker might suggest that today's situation in the Middle East is more likely to converge into peace, or only limited struggles, than a major war. But this is not just about the most likely outcome, it is also about the expected value of what will happen. Even a small chance of a major escalation probably makes this messy situation the No. 1 issue facing the world right now.
And if you're grumpy about the inability of social scientists or the news media to explain it to you in simple terms, that is exactly why the situation is so dangerous.
"Pictures: the mystical submarine discovery on the Swedish seabed," reads Tuesday's headline in Kvällsposten, a Southern Swedish daily.
Icelandic salvage hunting company Ocean X says it has found a small sunken Russian submarine, 20 meters long (65 feet) and 3.5 meters wide (11 feet), some 1.7 miles away from the coast of central Sweden. Swedish authorities haven't confirmed the nationality of the submarine.
Sweden reported nine months ago that a Russian vessel intrudes into its national waters, but authorities failed to find it despite the deployment of 200 men. It turns out that the vessel found yesterday was probably built in 1904 and could have served during World War I.
Anders Kallin, spokesperson for the Swedish armed forces, wouldn't confirm the submarine's nationality. But Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter (Today's News) was contacted by sources saying that there are Cyrillic letters on the sub's hull, confirming the Russian submarine hypothesis.
ABOUT THE SOURCE:Kvällsposten is an edition of Expressen distributed in southern Sweden. Its editorial offices are in Malmö.
