ANNA-ANASTASIA: NOTES ON "FRANZISKA SCHANZKOWSKA"

Anna Anderson’s biographer takes a closer look at the 1994 DNA results …

BY PETER KURTH

Grand Duchess Anastasia (center, 1916) and “Anna Anderson” (1968; 1960)

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you. — Søren Kierkegaard

These lines were sent to me by a friend in 1995, not long after the British Home Office's Forensic Sciences Service announced that mitochondrial DNA testing of the remains of “Anna Anderson” had proved conclusively that she was not Anastasia of Russia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. According to the British genetics team at Aldermaston, headed by Dr. Peter Gill, Mrs. Anderson's DNA failed to match that of the female skeletons excavated near Ekaterinburg in 1991, which are thought to be those of the tsarina and three of her daughters, or of other of Anastasia’s maternal and paternal relatives in England and elsewhere. At the same time, an analysis of the blood of Karl Maucher, a grand-nephew of the missing factory-worker Franziska Schanzkowska, revealed a mitochondrial match exact enough to conclude that Franziska and Anna Anderson were the same person. Subsequent tests at other laboratories, working with the same DNA extracted from the Ekaterinburg bones and with various samples of Mrs. Anderson’s hair and preserved body tissue – which are allegedly but not demonstrably authentic -- have reached the same conclusion. (For the latest news on the DNA question, click here and here [PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader]).

At the time of Dr. Gill's announcement I was recuperating from a near-fatal bout with pneumonia in New York. Journalists reported later that I had “collapsed” on hearing the news of Mrs. Anderson's unmasking and the demolition of what was called my "life's work.” Feeding this impression was my own remark, taped for a documentary in London, that if Anna Anderson's DNA should match Franziska Schanzkowska's "they'll have to carry me out of here on a stretcher.” This line has been thrown back at me ever since, along with another that aired the following year on PBS's "Nova": "If that woman was a Polish factory worker, I'm the Pope.”

In The Quest for Anastasia, John Klier and Helen Mingay maintain that "Peter Kurth ... was devastated by the results. … He had publicly proclaimed his belief that Anna was the Grand Duchess.” [1] Robert K. Massie, in The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, pulls a quote from the ether that at least lets me speak for myself: "I was involved in her story for nearly thirty years. For me—just because of some tests—I cannot one day say, `Oh, well, I was wrong.' It isn't that simple. I think it's a shame that a great legend, a wonderful adventure, an astonishing story that inspired so many people, including myself, should suddenly be reduced to a little glass dish.” [2]

Neither Massie nor Klier and Mingay approached me directly to know what I was thinking. Neither have they in any of the years since.

The grave of Anna Anderson-Manahan at Seeon Castle, Klostersee, Oberbayern; Anna Anderson (1965); Anastasia (1911)

In fact I knew the results of Dr. Gill's analysis for several weeks before they were announced. In October 1994, from Lenox Hill Hospital, I issued a statement, which I quote here in edited form:

I knew Anna Anderson for more than ten years and have been acquainted with virtually everyone involved in her quest for recognition over the last quarter-century: friends, lawyers, companions, neighbors, journalists, historians, Russian and European royalty and aristocratic families—a wide array of competent witnesses who didn't hesitate to acknowledge her as the daughter of the tsar. My experience of her character, my thorough knowledge of her case, and, it seems to me, probability and common sense all convince me that she was indeed Anastasia of Russia.

This conviction, while obviously challenged by today's announcement, remains unshaken. As a layman, I’m not in a position to dispute Dr. Gill's findings; had the results revealed only that Mrs. Anderson was not a member of the Romanov family, I might have been able to accept them, if not easily, then at least eventually. I am unable, however, by any persuasion of science or forensic testing, to credit the identification of Mrs. Anderson with Franziska Schanzkowska.

I can state without fear of reasonable contradiction that no one who knew Anna Anderson closely, who lived in her company for months and years, who tended and treated her through multiple illnesses as her doctor or nurse, who spoke with her at length and in detail about the stages of her life, who observed her comportment, carriage and demeanor and heard her converse intelligently on many subjects in several languages—I affirm that no one who knew her as I and others did can believe that she was born in an East Prussian farming village as the daughter and sister of beet farmers. 

Anastasia (1913; 1908) and Anna Anderson (1953; 1949). In 1920, during her incarceration at the Dalldorf Asylum in Berlin, most of Mrs. Anderson’s front teeth were removed; for this reason, she tended to cover her mouth when speaking and photographed. It was noted on examination of the skeletons unearthed at Ekaterinburg in 1991 that the teeth of the Russian imperial family were in bad condition, sharing "a special family dental disease.” Dental records of the imperial family have not been found.

Since I wrote those words, no evidence has come to my attention that alters my belief in Anna Anderson's authenticity. I want this to be clear, because I frequently hear that I've changed my mind. In my chapter on Anastasia in Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra , written just weeks after the DNA results were made public, I tried to give a balanced account of her story in a short space while making no effort to disguise my own convictions [3]. Because publishers don't want to spend money on backlist titles, I've never had the chance to update my first book, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, beyond the addition of a few hundred words on the last page. [4]

False and discredited reports about both Anna Anderson and Anastasia now turn up routinely in all media – the unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of a culture not just instant, but instantly recycled. "Animated" versions of the story don't help (the cartoon Anastasia, 1997), or the sentimental Romanov web sites and memorial pages that have lately exploded online. Here you will learn that the Romanovs are not just saints, “passion bearers” and martyrs to communism but resoundingly active in the lives of their admirers. None of these people, however, mystics though they are or seem to be, will hear a word against DNA science in the case of Anna Anderson.

Peterhof (ca. 1906); Spala (1912); Hannover (1938); Tsarskoe Selo (1916)

Both Massie's Final Chapter and Klier and Mingay's Quest for Anastasia, which purport to offer new information about Franziska Schanzkowska, are published without source notes, offering no clue to the origin of the claims they make. The authors cite the testimony of Franziska’s niece, Waltraut Schanzkowska, "a resident of Hamburg.” Massie quotes her: "My Auntie Franziska was the cleverest of the four children. She didn't want to be buried in a little one-horse town. She wanted to come out into the world, to become an actress—something special.” Neither book discloses that Waltraut Schanzkowska never knew Franziska and never saw Anna Anderson. [5] Massie refers in his acknowledgements to an "unpublished work" of the late Günther von Berenberg-Gossler, the prominent Hamburg jurist who opposed Mrs. Anderson during the last stages of her suit for recognition in Germany. [6] I can only hope that Dr. von Berenberg-Gossler's manuscript will someday appear in print. I look forward to reading it.

Tsarskoe Selo (1917); New York City (1929); Crimea (1916); Grand Duchess Tatiana ( ca. 1910)

In July 1998, after seven years of wrangling and confusion, the world saw the bizarre interment of the Romanov bones in St. Petersburg, an event that exposed not just the personal and political divisions in a greatly watered-down dynasty but the dishonesty of state-sponsored science, Russian-style. To the last minute, President Boris Yeltsin played dodging games with foreign and native Russian monarchists and the families of the dead, at first shunning the funeral ceremonies in deference to the rightful claimant, later emerging to steal the show for himself and his own ambitions. Among the guests at the funeral were several who had known Anna Anderson and whose thoughts remain private, as I well understand.

At the time of their interment in 1998 the Orthodox Church in Russia, under Patriarch Alexey II, refused to acknowledge or endorse the remains now buried in the Cathedral of Peter and Paul. During the funeral service, the officiating priest was forbidden to say the names of the victims in the prayer for the dead. What this implies for the peace of their souls I can't say, but we don’t need to attribute every Romanov pretender to "romantic delusion" or the "financial gold mine" I and other writers are alleged to enjoy through our involvement with this story. Two of the children’s skeletons are still missing, and no amount of hunting is going to find them, I think. Anyone who's been to Ekaterinburg since the fall of the Soviets knows that the city is run by hoodlums — if you prefer, by the local mob—and that for a period of 22 years, after the bones were ostensibly first located in their forest grave, every Tom, Dick and Harry with a connection and a bribe had access to the evidence. Pieces of the bones now float freely as relics. In the late 1970s, two of the skulls were kept under Gely Ryabov's bed in Moscow—if you believe Ryabov, the Russian "filmmaker and crime writer" who first reported their discovery in 1989, thirteen years after the event.

Anastasia (1914); Anna Anderson (1926); Anastasia (1910); Anna Anderson (1953); Anastasia (1916)

I was with Ryabov at a press conference in London in 1990, when he assured me that all five of the Romanov children's skeletons had been found. “I have held Anastasia's skull in my own hands," he declared. [7] I was in Ekaterinburg two years later, when Ryabov's one-time associate, the geologist Alexander Avdonin, having already told reporters that the bones of Grand Duchess Tatiana were missing, switched and said it was Maria, not Tatiana, and certainly not Anastasia, whose legend, in Avdonin’s view, was the invention of unscrupulous "foreigners" and "enemies" of the Russian state, its religion and culture. (Many times on the Romanov trail I confronted shocked Russian faces: "But you are not Russian! How can you be interested in this?") Archaeologist Ludmilla Koryakova of Ekaterinburg's Ural State University was ordered "practically at gunpoint" to excavate the bones in 1991. A year later she described the scene to me:

There was nothing like the proper atmosphere or precaution, no preparation, no tools and no instruments. The job was not only secret, but apparently urgent. We had one bulldozer, some military trucks, and several spades. Everything was done too quickly. They set up a tent and some klieg lights and kept the public away for three days. Everybody got digging, not just the experts. The evidence had already been considerably destroyed by earlier excavations. The skeletons were no longer lying in the way they had been dumped. At one point a power cable ran right through the pit and overturned the bones. Many were destroyed. I thought at first that the corpses had been dismembered, because they were so brutally treated. The skulls were smashed beyond recognition—there were just holes where the faces had been. I've seen a lot of skulls and bones but never so many that were so badly damaged. I was ill. It was a terrible picture. [8]

Anastasia (1916, 1915, 1913); Anna Anderson (1928)

Anastasia (1915, 1916); Anna Anderson (1976)

Meantime, a female skeleton measuring 5-feet 7 inches is buried in St. Petersburg under the name of Anastasia, despite the well-known disavowals of the American forensic experts who first examined the bones after their excavation; despite the evidence of photographs and contemporary accounts demonstrating that Anastasia was by far the shortest of the tsar’s daughters; and in the presence of two related female skeletons, measuring 5-feet 5 ½ inches and 5-feet 5 inches respectively (in other words, the shortest is now the tallest grand duchess). [9] American forensic anthropologist Diane France saw what was supposed to be Anastasia's skull before the burial and noted that "only the skullcap, down to the ridge that forms the eyebrows, had survived intact; the rest had been reconstructed from dozens of bone fragments.” Most of the bone plates were fully grown, moreover, "consistent with an older, nearly adult, female" (Anastasia had just turned 17 at the time of the murders; her sisters were 19, 21 and 22, respectively). When Dr. France refused to sign a document authenticating the skeleton as Anastasia's, "one of the Russians turned beet-red and began to berate her.” [10.] [See further notes of my interviews at Plaksin’s office in Russia and Greg King’s critique of the Russian forensics team.]

Franziska Schanzkowska (left): the only published photograph, reportedly from 1916; as she appeared (center) in the Berliner Nachtausgabe, March 1927; and (right) her face, three times retouched, as submitted in Pierre Gilliard and Konstantin Savitch’s La fausse Anastasie (Paris, Payot, 1929).

Grand Duchess Tatiana, Anastasia’s sister, for whom Mrs. Anderson was first mistaken

Anastasia -- Anna Anderson (center)

There is no space here to examine the story of Franziska Schanzkowska from start to finish, as it was born in 1927 in the Berlin daily Nachtausgabe and subsequently publicized, doctored and embellished. Looking through recent articles and web pages in preparation for this essay, I'm struck by the naiveté of the writers, the glibness of their arguments and their apparent ignorance of sworn testimony and documentation. John Godl’s Unmasking of Anna Anderson recounts the Schanzkowska saga verbatim as it was first told in the Nachtausgabe and asserts: "[Until August 1922] Anderson ... had been living with the Baron von Kleist and his family as the Grand Duchess Anastasia.... [In 1927] newspaper representatives visited the von Kleists' and showed them [Franziska's] clothing; they instantly identified it as that which they had bought for Anderson during her stay, Baroness von Kleist even pointing out distinctive monograms she had personally sewn on underclothes.” [11]

I have in front of me the sworn affidavit of Baroness von Kleist, notarized June 17, 1929 in Berlin, in which she categorically denies the Nachtausgabe account and adds that "all attempts" to convince her Anna Anderson was not Anastasia had been and would be in vain. [12]

Anastasia (1912, 1910) and Anna Anderson (1946, 1929) After operations for bone tuberculosis in 1925, Mrs. Anderson’s left arm was paralyzed at the elbow and invariably held tight against the body.

This is only one of many discrepancies. Because DNA science is held to be infallible, and for no other reason, we are asked to forget that Anna Anderson was a small, finely-boned woman of barely 5-feet 2 inches in height. A woman who met her in 1925 was "astonished to see how tiny she was.” Franziska, on the other hand, was remembered by the daughters of her Berlin landlady, Doris and Luise Wingender, as "a little taller than we are.” The Wingender sisters were both 5-feet-3. [14]

According to her family, Franziska wore a size 39 shoe (in Continental measurement); Anna Anderson wore size 36. Franziska’s hair was “dark, almost black” -- Mrs. Anderson’s was “sandy,” dark blond with a red sheen. In interviews with both the Wingender and Schanzkowski families in 1927, Franziska emerges as "stocky," "sturdy," "big-boned," "coarse," "grubby" and disinclined to bathe. [15] She was missing her front teeth and those that remained were “brown,” described by one witness as “black stumps.” (Anna Anderson’s teeth were extracted at Dalldorf -- eight of them, by report – and the ones that remained were not “brown.”) Franziska’s hands were "rough and work-worn"—noticeably so at the time of her disappearance in 1920, when she worked as a day laborer on a farm outside Berlin, planting asparagus. [16] Franziska had worked on farms and at farmers' markets since the age of thirteen, in 1909. During World War I, in Berlin, she was employed episodically in AEG munitions plants around the city. [17] Massie reports:

She worked as a waitress, met a young man, and became engaged. Before she could marry, her fiancé was called up for military service. … In 1916 the young man was killed on the western front. Soon afterward, Franziska let a grenade slip from her hands on the assembly line. It exploded nearby, inflicting splinter wounds on her head and other parts of her body and eviscerating a foreman, who died before her eyes. She was sent to a sanatorium, where her physical injuries healed but the shock remained. … Incapable of working for long periods, Franziska was in and out of sanatoria; in between, she remained bedridden at the Wingenders' apartment, complaining of headaches, swallowing pills, and reading history books from the local library. [18]

Anastasia (1910-1912); Anna Anderson (1969)

At this writing, I have seen no documentation of these claims. Franziska's younger sister, Gertrude Ellerik, who lived with her in Berlin during much of World War I, mentioned nothing similar in her testimony before the first Hamburg tribunal at Bad Liebenzell in 1959. On the contrary, Gertrude insisted that Franziska had "no distinguishing bodily marks," in particular, scars, moles, or the congenital malformation of the feet—hallux valgus—that was seen in both Anna Anderson and Anastasia. She was never wounded in the grenade-factory explosion and wasn’t hospitalized until later. [19] In Gertrude's words, "I certainly did not regard her as insane.” [20]

In contrast, Anna Anderson's "incredibly fine, soft hands" were so delicate and "beautifully kept" already in 1920, at the moment of her appearance in Berlin, that the doctors and nurses who attended her at the Dalldorf asylum made a note of it in their files. Her personality was "so distinctive" that she was excused from regular exercise and work detail with the other patients. Her body had been scarred by "many lacerations.” A large mole had been removed from her back [21]. Her eyes were a vibrant, vivid blue that sometimes turned gray and dark with mood.

I had read a lot about Mrs. Anderson's eyes before I saw them myself, and knew that some people had recognized her as Anastasia on the strength of her eyes alone (among them the prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, Nicholas II’s mistress before his marriage to Alix of Hesse). How odd to discover, therefore, that the Schanzkowski family "couldn’t recall" the color of Franziska’s eyes. Or did Mrs. Anderson simply burn them in my memory with her mesmeric powers? Such was Berenberg-Gossler's advice to a man who saw her in Germany in the 1960s: "Be prepared. She will win you over. She has the greatest suggestive power of anyone I have ever met"—what might be called the essence of royalty. [22]

The Tsarevitch Alexei; Anna Anderson (1949); Anastasia (ca. 1911)

Anastasia (1915, 1913), Anna Anderson (1929)

But it was ever thus with what I learned to call "the opposition"—snap judgment and hocus-pocus advanced as holy writ. Massie writes about Franziska Schanzkowska: "Her Polish family identity explains the central flaw in her claim: that is her ability to understand Russian but not to speak it as a native.” [23] Never mind the many witnesses who heard Mrs. Anderson speak Russian, and this from the earliest records of her existence: before her release from Dalldorf, she was even registered by the Berlin police as "die unbekannte Russin"—the unknown Russian woman. On no authority, Klier and Mingay suggest that "the German nurses" who attended her at Dalldorf in 1920-22 might not have been "able to distinguish Polish from Russian," a line that would draw a big laugh in Berlin. [24] One of the nurses had lived in Russia as a teacher and remarked that Mrs. Anderson spoke Russian "like a native. … She used whole, complete, connected sentences, without any impediments.” [25]

Anna Anderson (ca. 1950; 1981) and Anastasia (1917)

The first Romanov family member I ever interviewed, in February 1971, was Princess Nina of Russia (Princess Paul Chavchavadze), who would not acknowledge Anna Anderson as her cousin -- indeed, she was adamantly opposed to this idea. They had met briefly in 1928, when Mrs. Anderson lived at Oyster Bay, on Long Island, with Nina’s sister, Princess Xenia (at that time Mrs. William B. Leeds). Nevertheless, in spite of her negative opinion, Nina remarked without prompting, off the bat: "Whoever she is, she is no Polish peasant. She is a lady of good society and it is not true that she cannot speak Russian.” [26]

More to the point, the Schanzkowski family didn’t speak Polish, nor did they understand Russian when they heard it, according to sister Gertrude. The family wasn’t "Polish" at all in the sense we mean it now. Among a population that lived with constantly changing borders near Danzig (Gdansk), in Pomerania, the Schanzkowskis' local dialect was "Kashoub," which Gertrude remembered speaking fluently as a child, but which she later "forgot through disuse" [if you please!] [27] German, not Polish, was the language Franziska learned outside the home; after 1914, she was continually in Berlin, speaking and writing in German and signing her name in German Gothic script.

Anna Anderson and the tsar’s mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna.

DNA tests tell us nothing about "Franziska Schanzkowska.” They don't explain how she spoke "more English than German" already in the early 1920s [28], or how she arrived in America in 1928 speaking fluent English, having had only the most rudimentary "lessons" in the form of Mother Goose rhymes. [29] They don't explain her intimate acquaintance with the history, customs and lore of the Romanov family and every royal house of Europe; how she could deal with hotel staff in French [30]; play the piano with or without sheet music; walk, sit, stand or offer her hand in exactly the home-trained manner [31]; how she recognized members of the Romanov family just by the sound of their voices [32]; "walked through the garden calling the flowers by their quaint Russian names," etc. [33].

According to her sister, Franziska knew no foreign languages and read books only "now and then.” None of her siblings even entered high school; apparently Franziska was the only one in the family who read anything at all. Nevertheless, the village schoolteacher in her home town remembered her as "eher beschränkt als intelligent"—more limited than intelligent -- and there is no evidence that she exercised some “great suggestive power” over other people. Gertrude added, "I'm not aware that Franziska `put on airs' or pretended to `be the lady.’ She was just a girl like other girls.” [34] If and when someone publishes Berenberg-Gossler's memoirs, I hope they will include the letter of Gertrude's daughter, Margarete, sent to her uncle, Felix Schanzkowski, on May 16, 1959, in which Franziska’s niece urges Franziska’s brother to "recognize" Anna Anderson and realize her potential for the family: "It's not everyone who can say he has a full-blooded sister whom powerful and important people have mistaken for decades as the daughter of the tsar!"

Anastasia (1909); Anna Anderson (1953); Anastasia ( ca. 1905; Anna Anderson )1920). Pictures of the young grand duchess were normally retouched by court photographers, as were all official portraits

With this one exception, since 1927, the members of the Schanzkowski family have shown no voluntary interest in the woman science now says was their sister and aunt. Felix Schanzkowski met Anna Anderson twice and both times insisted she was a stranger [35], as did Franziska’s sister Juliana and her brother Valerian. A variety of motives have been invented for these people, all deceased, to explain their denial of kinship with Mrs. Anderson, in light of Gertrude’s lone affirmation that she was, indeed, Franziska—a recognition based on a forced confrontation at police headquarters in Hannover in 1938, on the command of the Nazis, when Mrs. Anderson’s attorneys were preparing to bring her case to court. Even then, Gertrude refused to sign a statement in support of her allegation. John Godl cites "the opinions of the Grand Duke of Hesse and Lord Mountbatten … that Anderson, besides being an impostor, was the pawn of a group of [Russian] emigres with Imperial Court knowledge who fed her information in an attempt to claim lost imperial assets and profit from the murder of the Imperial Family.” This is as good as the argument gets. [36] But no such "group of emigres" has been identified outside the movies, much less the source of their "Imperial Court knowledge."

Anastasia (1916); Anna Anderson (1920, the first known photograph); Grand Duchess Tatiana

Elsewhere, we read that Anna Anderson “knew nothing” about the Romanov family that couldn’t be found in newspapers, magazines and books—thus obliging “Franziska” to make a huge, ongoing study of popular literature in several languages she didn’t know. Between 1916 and 1920, when Franziska supposedly lay "bedridden at the Wingenders’" reading “history books” from a library no one ever saw her enter, no intimate account of the tsar’s family had been published in Berlin (or anywhere else, for that matter). Even the famous “Sokolov report,” detailing the murder of the Russian imperial family at Ekaterinburg, never appeared in a German edition before 1936, when it was used—as it was always meant to be used—to incite anti-communism and, by extension, anti-Semitism (So begann der Bolschewismus! was the German title of Sokolov’s book).

Klier and Mingay, whose analysis of the Anastasia case is the most facile, conclude their account with the remark that Anna Anderson owed her success—if that’s what it was—to luck. She was "lucky" in the coincidence of bodily marks, for example, having the same height, hair color, eye color, and, especially, the identical foot deformation of Grand Duchess Anastasia—no small accomplishment for a woman alternately called a lunatic and a deliberate fraud (usually, both). There is no doubt that the feet were the same; it was confirmed by Anastasia's childhood nurse, Alexandra Tegleva, and by Nicholas II’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, in 1925 and later, before the Hamburg tribunals. Pierre Gilliard, Anastasia’s one-time French tutor and the most vituperative of Anna Anderson’s enemies, even acknowledged that their eyes were the same. (“He was only one of the tutors!” Mrs. Anderson said.) And a scar on her forehead, as Mrs. Anderson explained, caused by a fall in childhood, accounts for the fact that Anastasia, from a very young age, always had her hair cut in a short fringe (“bangs”), even though the tsar’s daughters for years were dressed and wore their hair exactly alike, "big pair" and "little pair." [37]

Finally—incredibly—Anna Anderson was "very lucky" in the ear department, because, no matter how many times or by which forensic method photographs of her ears are compared with pictures of Anastasia’s, the result is the same: the ears are identical. [38] At Hamburg, a witness for the opposition remarked that the scars and stab wounds on Mrs. Anderson's body might have been "self-inflicted.” Now it's been suggested that she may have had her ears "mutilated" in the hope of victory. [39] I quote Brien Horan, who introduced me to Anna Anderson in July 1973:

I knew her well and therefore have formed a personal opinion in her favor. I cannot dispute DNA findings and I am not a conspiracy theorist. But I cannot suspend everything I know on the basis of these tests. … The odds are long that a fake claimant would be the right height, eye color and hair color, to begin with. The hallux valgus is an even greater long shot. The handwriting match is mind-boggling. And the ears send the odds right out of the park.

Can these odds be computed mathematically? What if this evidence makes it a million to one in her favor, and the DNA makes it a million to one against? This can't be reconciled—either the DNA was not hers or the ears were not hers, but we can identify the ears as we can see that they were attached to her head! [40]

The shape of ears does not change from cradle to grave. They get bigger -- and sometimes floppy – with age; otherwise, they are like fingerprints – no two persons have the same ones. In the compilation below (right), the red photos are of Anastasia's ear, while the blue inner ear is that of Anna Anderson. In 1993, these were determined to have an exact – “5-point” – match, the highest score possible.

Anastasia on the beach at Livadia—the large bunion (hallux valgus) is visible on her right instep; handwriting analysis of AA and Anastasia, 1964

DNA tests can’t explain why "Franziska Schanzkowska," who had already been committed and recommitted to Berlin hospitals and sanatoriums six times by 1920, was not immediately identifiable when Anna Anderson first appeared on February 17 of that year, especially as the Berlin police were duly informed by the Wingenders, on March 9, that she had "left, leaving no address.” They don’t explain why no one who knew Franziska before 1920, with the lone exception of Doris Wingender, approached Mrs. Anderson in later years. It is even alleged that Franziska, after the death of her "fiancé‚" "became promiscuous" and took dozens of lovers in Berlin (a trait that Mrs. Anderson, if she ever enjoyed it, discarded permanently the moment she surfaced in the city). For sixty years Anna Anderson was one of the most famous women in the world, hounded by reporters, writers, lurkers, sightseers, and all manner of opportunistic and delusional characters, eager to insert themselves into the picture. But no—not a friend or acquaintance or lover or co-worker of Franziska came near her in those years.

That I have seen Anna Anderson's face, heard her voice and detected her movements and mannerisms in several of Anastasia's Greek and Russian female cousins is a subjective assertion that anyone, naturally, is free to reject. My experience was not unique. There is, of course, the Romanov prince, a grandson of the tsar’s sister Xenia, who met Mrs. Anderson in Germany in 1965 and confirmed that she looked like his grandmother, while in manner, voice and conversation she reminded him of his Aunt Irina – Irina Yussupov, Xenia's only daughter and Anastasia's first cousin (whom “Anna Anderson” never met). [41] But we aren’t supposed to tell these stories anymore. Science has spoken. And the price of accepting Anna Anderson's identity with Franziska Schanzkowska is the willful disregard of all evidence to the contrary – in itself an irrational act. Massie writes in his Final Chapter:

Nevertheless, it was an astonishing and brilliant performance. … People paid attention to her; some bowed and curtsied and called her Your Imperial Highness. In time, her mind absorbed this alternative identity and she was transformed. … Many famous professional actresses, of equally humble origins, have convinced audiences playing the roles of majestic grandes dames. … Anna Anderson had sixty-three years to learn her part. [42]

This is history? Had Massie known Anna Anderson, he would know that false majesty and the manner of an “actress” were precisely the qualities she lacked, to her cost (when asked how she liked to be addressed, she answered in a certain bewilderment, “Well, Mrs. Anderson” -- no doubt another sign of mania). In those same sixty-three years, no one produced a shred of evidence to show how, when, where and through whom she "learned her part," or that her memories of Russia and the Romanov court rested on anything but her own experience. It’s certainly possible that someone might, in madness, pretend to absorb the identity of another – but this would likely be Napoleon or Jesus and it wouldn’t convince a soul. Dick Schweitzer – whose wife, Marina, is the granddaughter of Dr. Botkin, one of the four “servants” murdered with the tsar’s family at Ekaterinburg -- has said that he cannot accept Anna Anderson's identity as Franziska Schanzkowska because "it fits none of the rational experiences of people who knew her.” [43] I would add only that Shaw's Pygmalion – My Fair Lady -- in which a Cockney flower-girl is trained to walk, talk and behave "like a princess," is fiction, and for that matter a satire on the upper classes. ("Walk? Not bloody likely! I'm going in a taxi!")

I began this essay with a quote from Kierkegaard, the western philosopher most concerned with the meaning and significance of the Christian leap of faith. It is my hope that another generation of scholars and enthusiasts will continue to dig deeply for answers to this sad and tragic case. For myself, I can only echo the words of Faith Lavington, English governess to the children and grandchildren of Duke George of Leuchtenberg, who lived with Anna Anderson at Seeon Castle in 1927, was present at the eruption of the Schanzkowska scandal, and regretted until her death, nearly forty years later, "how great an intrigue still exists against this lady.” [44]  

ANASTASIA: THE RIDDLE OF ANNA ANDERSON

TSAR: THE LOST WORLD OF NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA

www.peterkurth.com

NOTES

1. Klier and Mingay, Quest for Anastasia, 222.

2. Massie, Final Chapter, 242. I declared further on NOVA: "It is impossible for me to accept that Anna Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska. I knew her. I'm speaking not as an expert, but as a witness … as someone who knew what her manners, her gestures, her every fiber was made of. … It's not about “Anna Anderson,” these statistics about what chance it would be that she was this, that, or the other thing. … It's not about her at all. It's about science. The tragedy of science and the dark side of science is that it doesn't take into account the authentic experience of real people. … That's all I'm doing here now -- is insisting on my own experience."

Ten years later, Greg King (author of The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina of Russia and co-author with Penny Wilson of The Fate of the Romanovs) adds for the record:

One needn’t believe in conspiracies or ascribe incompetence to those who conducted the testing to have doubts about their continued validity. Two distinct methods of DNA testing were used to show support for the hypotheses that Anastasia Manahan or Anna Anderson 1) Could not have been a child of Nicholas and Alexandra; 2) Did not match the mtDNA Hessian profile derived by Gill and used to match four of the female Ekaterinburg remains to the profile derived from HRH The Duke of Edinburgh; and 3) Matched the mtDNA profile of Karl Maucher, lending support to the hypothesis that she was Schanzkowska.

Both nuclear and mitochondrial (mtDNA) testing was done. Nuclear testing is preferred as it renders better results and is considered more accurate, while mtDNA is less discriminating. Nuclear DNA tests showed that AA could not possibly have been a daughter of N and A, yet changes in the science make the 1994 verdict obsolete. Gill used a 6-point Short Tandem Repeat (STR) analysis of the nuclear DNA to arrive at these results. Within four years of these tests, 10 point STR testing was being done, and when results of 10 point STR testing were compared with 6 point STR tests, the 6 point analysis was shown conclusively to give both false positive and negative results-in other words, conclusions based on 6 point STR tests were proved faulty. In 1999, the testing had gone from the 6 point STR tests of 1993-94 and the 10 point STR tests of 1998 to 12 point STR tests, the accuracy of which further undermined 6 point STR test results. Gill admitted this in a statement released in 2000, adding that FSS had changed from the old 6 point STR method to the 10 point STR method in 1999. In 2000, the STR tests were up to a 14 point system; in 2001, it was 16 points, and by 2002, the industry standard worldwide in STR testing was 20 point STR tests. Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that 6 point STR tests are unreliable and result in false matches and exclusions. The 6 point STR nuclear DNA tests that showed Anastasia Manahan could not have been a daughter of N and A, therefore, are now meaningless.

The mtDNA match to the Maucher profile is also now known to be less reliable than everyone believed. In 1994, mtDNA matches were believed to prove identity, and to be unique to related individuals. Last year, an extensive UK study showed that out of a random 100 persons, four completely unrelated subjects shared exactly the same mtDNA profiles; extrapolate that here, on a board with 400 members: of the 400 of us posting here, 40 of us-unrelated to each other-would have identical mtDNA profiles, thus "proving" that we're related. The odds of a random mtDNA match between the Manahan sample and the Maucher profile are indeed considerable given the size of the world’s population and the numbers involved. I suspect, based on the continuing evolution of the science, that future studies will show mtDNA profiles to be even more common than this.

My reservations about regarding the 1994 DNA tests as absolutely conclusive in the matter of Anastasia Manahan, therefore, rest on the advances of science. Two of the three planks in the DNA case against her have now been shown to be either unreliable or less than compelling in a mere ten years. Her exclusion from the Hessian mtDNA profile remains, and while the methods used to obtain the exclusion remain in practice, given the above changes I hesitate to presume that they, too, won’t be challenged as the science evolves; already in the last 2 years there have been two substantial challenges to the DNA testing done on the Ekaterinburg remains, and I suppose there will be more in the future that may or may not be valid. This makes it theoretically possible -- given the facts above about the first two DNA planks in the case -- that ultimately in another generation none of the DNA identifications/exclusions in the Anderson case will matter-and the case will fall back to where it always rested before the DNA -- to examination of physical traits, memories, recognitions, etc.

It seems to me, whether one wishes to believe in Anna Anderson or not (and I don't wish either way, incidentally), it’s best to keep an open mind and at least examine the facts as known now in the DNA case against Anastasia Manahan -- as three separate issues -- rather than repeatedly refer to ten year old tests that, taken as a whole, have lost two-thirds of their validity.

“Anna Anderson” (1925) – she had lost all of her front teeth and weighed about 75 pounds. Tthe resemblance to the tsar’s mother and his sister(Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, 1903) is easily detected.

King continues, on a “Romanov” chat-line (“The Alexander Palace Discussion Board” – http://hydrogen.pallasweb.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi):

The DNA does not prove anything in this case. It [did not] confirm the identities of Nicholas and Alexandra and the three children, but merely showed that Hessian and Romanov DNA was present in those remains. Thus saying that `DNA proves this is Nicholas, Alexandra, etc.,' isn't really correct -- what it shows is support for the hypothesis that the remains were theirs, and were related to their families. It does not show or confirm actual identity. … Where DNA is concerned, it is important to stress not only that in this case it did not identify anyone, but also that the very tests conducted in 1992-94 are now so out of date they are no longer used. For example -- using a 6 point STR DNA test, Anna Anderson was shown not to have been a child of Nicholas and Alexandra. By 1999, 10 point STR testing had shown that 6 point tests were not only inaccurate but also gave false positive and negative results; they were replaced with 12, then 16, and now 20 point STR tests. So the 6 point STR test which shows Anna Anderson wasn't a Romanov cannot be considered valid any longer, and is, indeed, subject to proved false results. The same can be said of mtDNA testing as well -- methodology has vastly changed, and we now know that the same mtDNA patterns are shared by perhaps 18-20% of the population -- it is not the discriminating factor it was described as seven or eight years ago. It is so inaccurate and so common that it is no longer used in court cases for identity and paternity tests -- they use nuclear DNA rather than mtDNA, which is subject to too many variables.

Nothing bothered me more for so many years as the resemblance between AA and FS, though obviously as Peter says they wouldn't have introduced a candidate who bore no resemblance to AA in an attempt to say that it was she. Since we have only the one doctored photo, though, I'm far more interested in things which don't get mentioned or explored-and ultimately that's what makes the case convincing to me. Not only issues like shoe size but that we have pretty complete month by month documentation now for FS's movements between 1912-1920, including her medical reports, which incidentally make it quite clear there were no scars involved in the munitions accident. These reports indicate that FS was never pregnant during this period, which is a crucial fact-up to a few weeks before AA appeared, FS is well accounted for, and just wasn't pregnant, whereas medical examinations of AA showed that she had given birth at some point (and I've confirmed this with the last doctor who actually examined her on the issue in the 1950s). So how does one reconcile two complete discrepancies-if FS wasn't pregnant, she could not be AA, who gave birth-no two ways about it. Then there are other issues, like AA's blood-in 1951 I think Professor Stefan Sandkueler (I'm probably spelling that wrongly but it's off the top of my head) took blood samples of AA. These samples when tested in 1993-4 did NOT match either the Schanzkowski DNA OR the putative AA Charlottesville tissue DNA profile-and yet these samples are the ONE thing we're certain about-contrary to what Massie wrote in his book they were carefully preserved as the professor told me himself, and not contaminated, and rendered workable and accurate results-and they remained in his possession alone, under lock and key, not subject to interference or contamination by others or by other agents like injection of preservatives as was the tissue in VA.

There are a number of these kinds of things which are quite important and which to me help prove that AA could not have been FS. They certainly don't prove she was Anastasia, but taken with the doubts about the mtDNA matches with Maucher, it leaves the DNA evidence-the supposed and presumed "end of the story" verdict-in the dust-and takes things back to square one-determination based on other factors. It amazes me that when the DNA results came out, almost every person came off with the same line-"she must have been a great actress"-and made absolutely no attempt to address the outstanding questions of people recognizing her, physical similarities, memories, human experience, etc.-all of it was simply swept aside without any mention to embrace the DNA as the final solution. No one yet has made any systematic attempt to address the outstanding contradictions in AA's case-how did a Polish peasant manage to fool numerous royals-who, given the class distinctions of the period-would certainly have immediately spotted someone who wasn't "one of them." The Duke of Leuchtenberg commented that it was clear, whoever she was, that she was a member of the highest social circles-how does this fit in with FS? It doesn't, yet no one has attempted to explain it. It's all of these things which convince me that she was Anastasia.

For recent news on the DNA question, click here and here (PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)

3. Kurth and Christopher, Tsar, 209-14; 218. In the wake of the DNA tests, the testimony of all of Mrs. Anderson's supporters has been called into question. This has been easier to achieve because most of the witnesses are dead. Writing in "Royalty Digest" in July 1995, Charlotte Zeepvat even suggested that, before her death in 1986, Mrs. Anderson's staunch adherent, Tatiana Botkin -- daughter of the tsar's physician Eugene S. Botkin, murdered with the imperial family at Ekaterinburg -- changed her mind about Mrs. Anderson's authenticity. I can attest not just from friendship with Mme. Botkin but also from her letters to me that nothing of the kind occurred.

4. Kurth, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, 1997 ed., 456. For the outlines of the Schanzkowska story see pp. 164-176.

Anastasia (1916); Empress Maria Feodorovna; “Anna Anderson” (1922, 1968)

5. Massie, 249; Klier and Mingay, 224. Klier and Mingay also report (223) that Franziska Schanzkowska and her brother Felix had a different mother than the other Schanzkowski siblings: “Her father married twice, and she was a child of the second marriage and close to her brother Felix. The first family were very religious and straitlaced, while Franziska and Felix were more open-minded.” This story was repeated on a now-defunct website, an attack on Anna Anderson snidely titled Franziska: “At some point in the distant past her family had been minor Polish nobility, but whatever glories and privileges that had entailed were long gone. Her father was said to have been an alcoholic, and at any rate died when she was still young. The child of a second marriage, Franziska and her full brother Felix were remembered as being free-spirited, less driven by religion than their half sisters.” Again, no source is given for this claim. Neither Klier and Mingay nor Franziska’s anonymous author seem to notice that, if this is true, the mitochondrial DNA obtained from a descendant of Gertrude Schanzkowska would not and could not match Franziska’s, since this DNA is passed only through the female line and they did not have the same mother. Penny Wilson observes:

There were six children of the marriage between Anton Schanzkowski and Marianna Wiscek:

Martin Christian, b. 16 November 1895, died in early childhood

Franziska, b. 22 December 1896

Michael, b. 16 December 1899, died in infancy

Valerian, b.