ANNA-ANASTASIA: NOTES ON "FRANZISKA SCHANZKOWSKA"
BY PETER
KURTH
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
At the time of Dr. Gill's announcement I was
recuperating from a near-fatal bout with pneumonia in New
York London
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.
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
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 only revealed 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 in 1896
as the daughter and sister of beet farmers.
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.
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 Hamburg Germany
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
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]
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.
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
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 Berlin
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]
At this writing, I have seen no documentation of
these claims. Franziska's younger sister, Gertrude Ellerik, who lived with her
in Berlin Hamburg
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
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 Russia
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
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!"
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
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
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
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 a little floppy – with age; otherwise, they are as reliable a mode of
identification as fingerprints – no two persons have the same ones.]
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 – which he did not -- 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]
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 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.”
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 the latest 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.
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.
Michael, b. 16
December 1899, died in infancy
Valerian, b.
Felix, b.
Juliane Marianna,
b.
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,
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
Curiously, when
the
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
10. “Death Becomes Her,” SF
Weekly,
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,
13. Testimony of Marie Adèle Amy Smith,
14. Testimony of Doris Rittman and Luise Fiedler, geb.
Wingender,
15. Protocols of Wilhelm Völler and Fritz Schuricht, April 1927,
16. Fiedler testimony,
17. Testimony of Gertrude Ellerik,
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
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,
21. Abstract in protocol of
Prof. Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer,
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.
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
VII told his niece, Empress Alexandra, that her children's English was
"abominable."
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. 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 2005 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)