ANNA-ANASTASIA: NOTES ON "FRANZISKA SCHANZKOWSKA"
Anna Anderson’s biographer takes a closer look at the 1994 DNA results …
BY PETER
KURTH
Comments to peterkurth@peterkurth.com
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
At the time of Dr. Gill's announcement I was recuperating from a
near-fatal bout with pneumonia in New York London 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
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
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
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.
Spala (1912); Hannover (1938); Charlottesville
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 Germany
Tsarskoe Selo
(1917); New York City
In July 1998, after seven years of wrangling and confusion, the world saw
the bizarre interment of the Romanov bones in St. Petersburg
At the time of their interment in 1998 the Orthodox Church in Russia Moscow
Anastasia
(1910); Anna Anderson (1953); Anastasia (1916)
I was with Ryabov
at a press conference in London Ural State University
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); Anna Anderson (1929)
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
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 (1915,
1916); Anna Anderson (1976)
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 Anderson
I have in front of me the sworn affidavit of Baroness von Kleist, notarized June 17, 1929 in Berlin
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
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 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 (ca. 1910); Anna Anderson (1928);
Anastasia (1915)
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 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
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
Anastasia
(1916); Anna Anderson (1920, the first known photograph); Grand Duchess Tatiana
Anna Anderson (1925); the
four daughters of Nicholas II, Maria, Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia (in
captivity, 1917)
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. 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]
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
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
NOTES
1. Klier and Mingay, Quest for Anastasia, 222.
2. Massie, Final Chapter, 242. I declared further on
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
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
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
“Anna Anderson” (1922),
Anastasia ( 1917, 1916), Empress Maria Feodorovna
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
King
continues on a “Romanov” chat-line (“The Alexander
Palace Discussion Board” – http://hydrogen.pallasweb.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi):
The
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
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
For recent news on the
“The height, the form, the color of the hair are exactly hers. … The
mouth has changed and coarsened noticeably, and because of the face’s leanness
the nose appears to be larger than it was.
But … her unforgettable eyes and the look in them have remained exactly
the same.” — Tatiana Botkin (1926)
3. Kurth and Christopher, Tsar, 209-14;
218. In the wake of the
4.
Kurth, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, 1997 ed.,
456. For the outlines of the Schanzkowska story see pp. 164-176.
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
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. 25 April, 1901
Felix, b. 17 February 1903
Juliane Marianna, b. 30 April 1905
These children were born in Borek, Klein Pomieske or Schwarz Damerkow, and all of their births were recorded at the
local level. In recent years, Poland has centralized many records, including
birth records of the children listed above.
The marriage between Anton and
Marianna was Anton's second. His first, to Josefina Peek, ended without issue.
It is unclear how Anton and Marianna's marriage ended: Some sources have him
dying circa 1910/1912, and some have them divorcing at that time. Marianna went
on to marry again, though she apparently had no further children. There are
also references to a third marriage of Anton's, which obviously couldn't have
happened if his death ended his second marriage.
Gertrude's birth record has not
been found, despite searches at the national level, and searches in Borek, Butow, Klein Pomieske and Schwarz Damerkow,
all places associated with the Schanzkowsky family.
She herself claimed a birthdate of 12 November 1898,
thus placing herself in birth-order (if a child of Marianna and Anton) behind
Franziska and before Michael. However, Anton is known for having had many
affairs, mostly when the family fell on hard times and he occasionally had to
work as an itinerant farm worker. The possibility remains that Gertrude was a
child of one of Anton's affairs -- which would explain many things, including Waltraut's statement that Franziska was the cleverest of
the FOUR children. Minus the two sons who died young, there WERE four Schanzkowsky children: Franziska, Valerian, Felix and Juliane Marianna.
Curiously, when the German Court
Investigator was in the Schanzkowsky family home in
the late 20s, Marianna, Juliane Marianna, Valerian,
and Felix were present for questioning. When she was asked about Gertrude's
whereabouts, Marianna said this was not an issue that concerned her, and that
she and Gertrude's husband had agreed that she should stay away. I'm not
certain what interpretation can be placed on these remarks, but the
implications are obvious, though the reason for keeping Gertrude away could be
as simple as her having been pregnant at the time.
6. Massie, 295.
7. Interview with Gely
Ryabov, April 1990.
8. Interview with Ludmilla
Koryakova, September 1992. See also Kurth, THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOV
BONES, in Vanity
Fair, January 1993.
9. C. Bernard Ruffin to the Washington Post,
July 30, 1998, with reference to Maples and Browning, Dead Men Do Tell Tales
(1994), 256. The empress wrote to
Anna Viroubova from Tobolsk
on December 17, 1917: “Anastasia, to
her despair, is now very fat, as Marie was, round and fat to the waist, with
short legs. I do hope she will grow.” Three months later (21 March 1918),
Anastasia wrote to her father’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna,
“I've not yet turned into an elephant, though I might yet very soon. I really don't know why so suddenly - maybe
it's from too little movement, though I don't know.” In 1925, at the time of her meetings with the
Tsar’s younger sister, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna,
and with Anastasia’s French tutor, Pierre Gilliard,
Anna Anderson weighed less than seventy-five pounds: “There was not an ounce of
fat on her body.” Olga added: “You have no idea how wretched that woman
looked!”
Tobolsk, Winter
1917-1918;
10. “Death Becomes Her,” SF Weekly, July
29, 1998.
11. See John Godl, The Unmasking of Anna Anderson. Since this paper was first
published, the lines about Baroness von Kleist appear
to have been excised, as do the later lines (note 38) about the purported
“mutilation” of Mrs. Anderson’s ears.
12.
Affidavit of Maria von Kleist, original in Edward
Fallows papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
13.
Testimony of Marie Adèle Amy Smith, December 18,
1965, Hamburg.
14.
Testimony of Doris Rittman and Luise Fiedler, geb.
Wingender, November 18, 1965, Hamburg. Of the two Wingender
sisters, only Doris, the elder, met Mrs. Anderson. In 1927, she was paid 1500 marks by the Berliner
Nachtausgabe to identify the claimant with
Franziska. It seems like a small amount
now, with different currencies and valuations, but at the time it represented
at least a year’s wages for an ordinary worker in Berlin.
15.
Protocols of Wilhelm Völler and Fritz Schuricht, April 1927, Hamburg. Dr. Völler was a
lawyer and Schuricht a private detective employed by
Mrs. Anderson's friend and guardian, Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann,
with financial assistance from Duke George of Leuchtenberg. Nothing to contradict their account of Franziska’s life has emerged from any quarter.
16. Fiedler testimony, Hamburg.
17.
Testimony of Gertrude Ellerik, May 23, 1959,
Hamburg.
18. Massie, 249-50. No one has even tried to explain what moved
the Wingender family to support a bedridden tenant,
too sick to work, for nearly five years.
Undoubtedly, they might have availed themselves of her ration card –
which would also explain why they never reported Franziska’s
disappearance until three weeks after “Anna Anderson” turned up in Berlin.
19. Both Massie and Ellerik
are mistaken here: Franziska was first hospitalized in 1915 for a mental
breakdown and ultimately certified as "not cured, but not dangerous.” See Massie, 249.
20. Ellerik testimony,
Hamburg
21. Abstract in protocol of Prof. Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, March 18, 1926, Hamburg. The psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer
was the father of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged
by the Nazis for his opposition to Hitler.
Dr. Bonhoeffer examined Mrs. Anderson over a
period of weeks in 1926: “Although her
bearing, her manner of speech, and a certain friendly grace in mimicry and in
the way she expresses herself all clearly indicate that the patient has come
from cultured circles, it is still difficult to receive a complete picture of
her personality. … In longer
conversations congestion of the face sets in and her features become taut. In conversation and social interaction,
however, she always maintains a kindly, obligingly attentive manner. Her choice of words is often unusually clever
[but] she will never paraphrase anything.
In speaking she will indicate that she cannot think of a word she wants to use. … Her
pronunciation is foreign, with a Russian accent, which, however, has a particular
nuance to it. … It has been asked if there can be any question of hypnotic
influence on the patient by some third party.
This is to be denied, as is the supposition that the whole affair is a
deliberate fraud.” Berlin’s Dalldorf Asylum (Irren-
und Idiotenanstalt Dalldorf)
where Mrs. Anderson was first committed after a suicide attempt in 1920, is now
the Karl-Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik. The original asylum records were presumed
lost in the bombardment of
22. Massie, 250-51. In fact Berenberg-Gossler
never "met" Anna Anderson. He
is referring here to their one and only encounter at Unterlengenhardt
during a special session of the "Anastasia" trial in 1965. On noticing his presence, she ordered him out
of the room; her own lawyer was obliged to leave, too, and that was the end of
it. She remained alone before the
judges.
s
23. Ibid. , 250.
24. Klier and Mingay, 136.
25.
Affidavit of Erna Buchholz, June 29, 1929, Fallows
papers. Mrs. Anderson also spoke English with a slight
trace of Yorkshire, according to a reputably reliable "voice
analysis" commissioned for Channel 4’s Equinox program in
London. Sidney Gibbes,
English tutor to the tsar’s children, was a Yorkshireman;
Anna Anderson never went to England, and Anastasia did so only once, when the
Russian and British ruling families met briefly on the Isle of Wight. Gibbes was employed
in 1908 after King Edward
26.
Interview with Nina Chavchavadze, February 1971. Over a period of six months, Princess Xenia
heard Mrs. Anderson speak Russian many times -- “and perfectly acceptable
Russian from the point of view of St. Petersburg society.” Xenia’s daughter added: “The family was so polylingual
that, when speaking among themselves, they chose a word simply for its
precision, from one of several languages. … My mother deliberately substituted
Russian words in the crux of a sentence to see if Anastasia would follow what
was said. She always did” (unpublished
manuscript of Brien P. Horan, Anastasia?, copy
in Hoover Institution archives, Stanford University).
27. Ellerik testimony,
Hamburg: “I do not understand a Russian
when he speaks in Russian to me. I have
never spoken with a Russian.” Gertrude
was in fact unable to remember whether, growing up, her family had spoken
Polish or Kaschoub; in either case, it was a local,
“farmers’” dialect and she had forgotten it:
“There can be no question of Franziska speaking Russian, English or
French,” according to all who knew her.
The same voice tests commissioned
for Equinox were unable to determine Anna Anderson’s first language,
although Russian and Plattdeutsch—low
German—were the contenders, serving either side in the Anastasia
controversy. Franziska Schanzkowska’s Kashoubian
background, however, is distinct and should be stressed. The Kashoubs were
subsistence farmers in Pomerania, neither Polish nor
German, although under German rule during Franziska’s
childhood, with a unique dialect even now depicted satirically as oafish and
crude. Günther Grass
parodies “de
Kaschuben” in The Tin Drum -- “weil unserains nich richtich polnisch is und
nich richtich deitsch jenug, und wenn man Kaschub is, das raicht weder de
Deitschen noch de Polacken. De wollen
es immer jenau haben!” Kashoubs are a discrete ethnic and linguistic
minority, in no way linked to Russia. See Klaus-Dieter
Kreplin’s Kashoubian Reader (in German only): “Die Frage ist umstritten, ob die kaschubische Sprache als eigenständige
Sprache gilt oder lediglich als ein polnischer Dialekt zu betrachten ist. Sicher ist: Kaschubisch kann, wenn es schnell
gesprochen wird, von Polen nicht verstanden werden.”
28. Konrad Wahl to Peter
Kurth, January 30, 1977. Wahl was the
grand-nephew of Inspector Franz Grünberg, who
sheltered Mrs. Anderson after her release from Dalldorf
in 1922.
29. Diary of Faith Lavington,
1927, Hamburg: “I am to have the
doubtful pleasure of giving the last of the Tsar’s daughters a small English
lesson every day at five o’clock.” At
the first of these, Miss Lavington recorded, she
found AA “much more nervous than I was. …
In order to get her to talk, I took a nursery rhyme book with me, with
very gay colors, and by asking her questions about these pictures, I got her to
speak quite a lot and could see that she does know English very well. [She spoke] with the purest and best English
accent. … I was quite amazed at the purity of her speech.” No grammar books were ever used – the
“lessons” were nothing like tutoring or instruction and were discontinued
quickly, after AA “quarreled” with almost everyone in the Duke of Leuchtenberg’s household over what she perceived (wrongly)
to be their complicity in the denial of her identity. “I was standing by positively trembling,”
Miss Lavington confessed, “expecting nothing less
than a pied au derrière,” which, indeed, she finally got. “You will think me awfully sentimental,” Miss
Lavington wrote to her sister in England, “but I must
own that I feel it most terribly, for I gave of my very best. … I feel a
miserable, gnawing pity and anxious solicitude still for this poor woman – a
sort of feeling as if some living part had been torn right out of me.”
30. Affidavit of Agnes Gallagher, December 22,
1930, Fallows papers. Gallagher was the
Scottish governess of Nancy Leeds (Mrs. Edward J. Wynkoop). In 1928 Nancy’s mother, Princess Xenia, sent
Gallagher to Europe in order to escort Mrs. Anderson to the United States. "I'm not sure she actually spoke
French," Gallagher affirmed, "but we got exactly what we wanted for
breakfast."
31.
Interview with Mrs. Edward J. Wynkoop, April 1971.
32.
Testimony of Xenia Judd (Princess Xenia of Russia), March 16-17, 1959, Hamburg:
“It was so matter-of-course, so unforced
-- in no way a theatrical gesture. … Fourteen years had passed since I last saw
Anastasia in the Crimea in the spring of 1914, but I felt I was competent to
make up my mind on the difference between a member of my own family and an
unfortunate Polish peasant woman who, so it was claimed, had been taught these
things. … I felt that if she were separated from doubtful people accused of
suggesting memories and facts which she claimed to know, then her true identity
and personality must reveal themselves.
This in my opinion is exactly how it turned out, what I found and have
therefore firmly believed ever since:
that she is Anastasia … that her behavior did not consist of studied posturings and words she had learned, but rather that she
was herself.”
33.
Affidavit of Margharita Derfelden,
May 15, 1929, Fallows papers. See also
Kurth, Anastasia, 214-15.
34. Ellerik testimony,
Hamburg.
35. In 1927 Felix Schanzkowski
declared: "There does exist a strong
resemblance between [Mrs. Anderson] and my sister. The resemblance is strong when you look from
the front, but not when you look from the side…. [Mrs. Anderson's] speech … as
well as her general manner of expression is totally different from that of my
sister…. There can be no doubt that she did not have the slightest idea who I
was. You could clearly see that she did not know me…. She showed no sign either
of astonishment or the slightest fear. She behaved rather as one behaves toward
a third party to whom one is just being introduced" [affidavit of Felix Schanzkowski, May 9, 1927, Fallows papers].
36. Godl, op cit.
37. Kurth, Anastasia, 85.
38. Klier and Mingay, 161.
39. Godl, op cit.
40. Kurth, Anastasia, 456.
41. This was Alexander Romanoff, grandson of the
tsar’s sister Xenia; Alexander died in London in 2002. When my Anastasia was first published
in 1983, Alexander refused to be quoted by name concerning his thoughts on the
disappearance of Nicholas II’s private fortune, which
his grandmother hunted for years, but did not prevent me from citing short
passages from his letters without specific attribution: “Believe you me, as
they say, it is more than unlikely that they would allow her to win.”
As a
measure of royalty’s sentimentality over fallen relatives, the Duke of Windsor
recalled the morning in 1917 when the fate of his Russian cousins was decided:
“I was there at breakfast. Yes.
With the king [George V] … and the queen [Queen Mary]. Just the three of us. Suddenly an equerry comes in. I mean this was breakfast, for
heaven’s sake! Not done, you know,
ever. The king was furious, but the man
went straight up to him with this note, which the king read and gave my mother,
and she read it and gave it back and said, `No.’ The king gave it to the equerry and said,
`No.’ Later that day I asked my mother
what that was all about and she said the government was willing to send a ship
to rescue the tsar and his family but she did not think it would be good for us
to have them in England and so the Bolsheviks shot the lot of them” (Gore
Vidal, Palimpsest, 208).
42. Massie, 250.
43. Klier and Mingay, 228.
44. Faith Lavington to
Ian R. Lilburn, April 1964, in Lilburn's collection.
Copyright 2008 by Peter Kurth. All rights reserved.
This essay first appeared, in
different form, in ATLANTIS: In The Courts of Memory, vol. 1, no. 4. Dates of some photographs are
approximate.
I have used the name Anna Anderson
throughout, as it was the claimant’s only legal identity before she married
John E. Manahan in 1968.
Peter
Kurth lectures on
Anna
Anderson (link to
mp3. audio – file needs downloading to hear the full version)