The Resurrection of the Romanovs

by Greg King

  Whether such a trip actually took place mattered little to Anderson’s claim; rather, it was the contention that her allegation revealed intimate knowledge that was pivotal. Her supporters may have believed this to be true, but it was clear from the parade of witnesses that far from being some kind of privileged secret, rumors of such a trip were widespread, at least within aristocratic and émigré circles. Given her exposure to such influences after leaving Dalldorf, it was at least possible that Anderson encountered the story while living with the von Kleists or Nicholas von Schwabe.84 In short, her knowledge of the rumors—whether true or not—went no farther than to show that Anderson had been exposed to gossip surrounding the issue.

  On February 28, 1967, after three years of testimony, the Hanseatic Oberlandesgericht Court delivered its verdict. The claimant’s appeal was rejected: she had not met the burden of proof imposed by her suit and provided convincing evidence that she was Anastasia. Wollmann, who declared his intention of taking the case to the West German Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe, particularly objected to two points in the ruling, for the court had apparently inexplicably commissioned and then ignored the anthropological and handwriting studies conducted by Otto Reche and Minna Becker, studies entirely in the claimant’s favor. In fact, the court rejected all of the anthropological studies, not merely those suggesting that Anderson was Anastasia. They did so, as they explained, because the end results were too contradictory: seven studies produced five opinions against the claimant and two in her favor. None could establish who she actually was to a degree of legal certainty.85 Even Eickstadt and Klenke acknowledged the subjective nature of the photographic comparisons, describing the results as “degrees of estimated probability” that render “only a possible approximation within a certain latitude of error.”86 Such studies offered the court only collected—and often contradictory—opinion based on individual analyses, and analyses confined to the often crude technology available at the time, which largely—as in Reche’s work—consisted of simply cutting and pasting one photograph atop another and trying to match features visually.

  And as evidence, the handwriting comparisons, the court ruled, fell into the same category—suggestive but too contradictory to be of legal value. The problem with the modern analyses done by Dulckeit, Delamain, Becker, and others, the court wrote, was that the samples examined had been insufficient and of poor quality.87 It was an opinion shared by Delamain, who had complained that all of the tests were too limited to allow for any absolute verdict. The experts were often forced to work from photocopies, and original documentation, which was necessary to accurately analyze pressure and stroke formation, was too often missing from the materials made available to graphologists.88

  By January 1970, when it finally reached the West German Federal Supreme Court, Anderson’s case had become the longest legal battle in German history. The Supreme Court took the case, now argued for the claimant by Dr. Baron Curt von Stackelberg, as a judicial review. The purpose was not to relitigate the accumulated evidence, but rather to determine whether the ruling by the Hanseatic Oberlandesgericht Court had been free of judicial error. The verdict finally came on February 17, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of Anderson’s leap into the Landwehr Canal. The Hanseatic Oberlandesgericht Court, the Supreme Court found, had ruled appropriately on the question of rejecting its own experts. Such a matter, they wrote, “was a matter of responsibility entirely within the realm of the judges. When confronted with an opposite interpretation of such evidence, or should they be subject to any doubt, the judges were legally obligated to deny the case if conscientious examination of the assertion renders individual certainty of the truth impossible.”

  The Supreme Court noted that Anderson “has had sufficient opportunity, independent of the burden of proof and unfettered by any procedural rulings of the civil law, to clarify her identity.” Rather than so doing, however, they ruled that “she has refused, in an astonishing manner, to contribute to the clarification of her identity.” Despite what they found to be “the plaintiff’s broad and entirely favorable access to the German legal system,” Anderson, for reasons the Supreme Court found “incomprehensible,” had “repeatedly evaded any attempts to discover her identity and refused explanations” that would clarify her origins. They specifically noted her “persistent refusals” to answer important questions that would resolve her case.

  “An examination of the scars from wounds allegedly received during the massacre,” the court noted, “has not substantiated their nature, their origin, or their cause.” Medical documentation failed to “establish any physical link to Grand Duchess Anastasia,” while “those remaining physical characteristics which lend themselves to reliable comparison yield no definite criteria” to support the claimant’s contention. In particular, the Supreme Court noted that “the plaintiff has refused to cooperate with court-imposed attempts to clarify the extent and nature of her scars,” which made it impossible to validate the assertions made about them.

  Reviewing the collected statements and depositions advanced by Anderson’s lawyers as evidence of her intimate knowledge of the life of the imperial family, the Supreme Court declared that these “lose all persuasive power” if, as was nearly always the case upon close examination, “they can be traced to another source to which the plaintiff had access.” In assessing many of her asserted memories, the court noted that it was impossible, “owing to the lack of extensive and convincing data available to the public,” to adequately confirm or deny Anderson’s statements. “Her early and spontaneous statements,” the decision read, “contained nothing beyond those subjects covered in numerous published materials known to have been made available to her with the von Kleist and von Schwabe families; later, she had even more materials at her disposal.”

  Addressing frequent declarations from Anderson’s supporters that what they deemed to be her refined manner was evidence that she was Anastasia, the court rather scathingly declared, “The plaintiff’s general behavior offers no definitive proof one way or the other for her claim. Certainly she has exhibited no lapse in behavior since the presumed age of twenty, but this in itself provides no evidence of high birth. Further, it must be noted that there are significant facts related to the plaintiff’s activities in the early years of her claim that cannot be ignored. Favorable opinions of her behavior originate from a period when the plaintiff lived among émigré supporters of means and rank, a time when through careful observation she could absorb the subtle behaviors suited to royal rank.”

  Although not within their specific purview, the Supreme Court did examine the issue of Anderson’s languages. “The plaintiff,” it judged, “has not succeeded in proving that her linguistic abilities match those of Grand Duchess Anastasia.” Anderson, the court declared, “possesses an understanding of the Russian language, but has consistently refused to provide the court with proofs of conversational ability.” The ruling noted that Anderson’s “knowledge of Russian, even at a time immediately following her alleged rescue, did not accord that which would be expected from Grand Duchess Anastasia.” As to the German language, the Supreme Court corrected decades of misinformation from Gilliard and others that Anastasia was given no lessons in the language and that she did not speak it, noting that the grand duchess was given special lessons in the language periodically from 1912 until 1918. But, the court ruled, “The plaintiff’s knowledge of German, even in her early years, exceeded that of Grand Duchess Anastasia.” The issue of languages, the ruling declared, “does not provide any compelling evidence to indicate the plaintiff’s identity with the youngest daughter of the Tsar.”

  “The appeal of the plaintiff,” the court ended, “has been rejected as groundless.” They found no procedural errors in her case and noted that under German law the burden of proof had rested with her. Anderson and her lawyers, through “the collected evidence presented for judicial consideration in four successive legal venues,” had failed to “definitively prove that the plaintiff is the T
sar’s youngest daughter.” If she could not prove that she was Anastasia, though, neither could her opponents prove that she was not, as the Supreme Court was careful to record; the death of Anastasia in 1918, the ruling declared, was not a matter of historically established fact.89

  It was over, but Anderson, as usual, expressed nothing but disinterest. By the time the final verdict came, she had gone from Germany, the faded dreams of her youth abandoned as she slipped into the twilight years of her legendary existence.

  17

  “How Shall I Tell You Who I Am?”

  In the third week of October 1963, a new issue of Life magazine appeared in millions of American mailboxes and on newsstands. A sepia photograph of the five children of Nicholas and Alexandra stared out from the cover, bearing the intriguing caption “The Case of a New Anastasia.” The story within recounted the claim of a woman named Eugenia Smith, who had lived in obscurity near Chicago before a small New York publisher purchased her reputed memoirs. She offered a manuscript detailing how a sympathetic soldier named Alexander had rescued her after the executions in Ekaterinburg and spirited her across Russia to Romania, a story line clearly influenced by Anderson’s claim. Smith passed a lie detector test, but photographic, handwriting, and anthropological analyses all refuted her claim, as did Princess Nina Georgievna, who met and promptly declared Smith an impostor.1

  In the chalet at Unterlengenhardt, news of Smith’s claim sent Anderson into an indignant fury. She believed that Smith had been invented and funded by Lord Mountbatten to distract attention from her own coming appeal in Hamburg. “All this dirt going round me,” she once wrote, “the dirt what [sic] a creature of the Battenberg [Lord Mountbatten] is publishing!”2 From America, Gleb Botkin assured her that Smith “bears not the slightest resemblance to Your Imperial Highness.”3 This new “Anastasia” soon fizzled when it was found that she had been born in Romania in 1899, but her very public debut was symptomatic of the intense interest engendered by Anderson’s story. In the wake of 1956’s triumphant film Anastasia came new books arguing or disputing Anderson’s claim; new magazine articles chronicling her legal battles; and an NBC Television revival of the Maurette play starring Julie Harris as the would-be grand duchess. In 1965 Constance Towers and Lillian Gish took the stage in Anya, a new Broadway musical based on Anderson’s story, and in 1967 Sir Kenneth MacMillan opened his famed ballet Anastasia in London. That same year saw the publication of Robert Massie’s international best seller Nicholas and Alexandra, a work that, more than any other, popularized the story of the last tsar and his family and marked their shift from shadowy history to modern popular culture. “Who is this Massie?” Anderson quizzed Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg. When Prince Friedrich explained and gave her a copy of the book, though, she erupted in anger. “I don’t want this book!” she yelled. “I don’t need this book! I don’t want to read it! That book, take it away!”4

  Anderson with her dog Baby, Unterlengenhardt.

  Her vehement reaction may have stemmed from the publicity the book received, something she apparently linked—probably correctly—to the sudden reappearance of cars and busloads of unwelcome tourists who again crowded the streets of Unterlengenhardt and tried to peer over her garden wall to see for themselves this possible grand duchess, this woman portrayed by Ingrid Bergman, this solitary and mysterious figure at the center of one of the century’s greatest enigmas. Even the rejection of her legal appeal in 1967 did nothing much to dampen public interest or enthusiasm; no one could satisfactorily explain her scars, or account for her apparently intimate knowledge, or sufficiently refute the favorable photographic and handwriting comparisons, or explain away the seemingly compelling recognitions by Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, Princess Xenia Georgievna, the Botkins, or Lili Dehn. And still it continued, this slow accumulation of intriguing detail that drop by drop created a modern legend. In July 1965 Ian Lilburn arranged for the usually reluctant claimant to meet Prince Alexander Nikitich Romanov, grandson of Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna. Alexander had never known Anastasia, but after spending two hours with Anderson in her garden, he confessed to Lilburn that he believed she must be the grand duchess, as she so closely resembled his grandmother and his aunt Princess Irina Yusupov.5 Something similar took place in 1967, when a reporter interviewed elderly ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska at her home in Paris. The former mistress of Nicholas II before his marriage, and morganatic wife and now widow of Andrei Vladimirovich, she had seen Anastasia only from a distance on a few rare public occasions, but her husband introduced her to Anderson in 1928 as she passed through Paris on her way to America. Even after thirty-nine years, the former ballerina declared, “I am still convinced it is she. You understand, when she looked at me with those eyes, well, that was it, they were the emperor’s eyes, the same exact look that the emperor had.”6

  Perceived resemblances to elderly relatives, the memory of a former lover’s eyes after seventy years—it was all so vague, so reminiscent of the intangibles that had convinced people such as Tatiana and Gleb Botkin, and Princess Xenia Georgievna. But to Anderson none of it mattered. It was all too late to make a difference in a life winding toward its close. If she had ever been interested in legally pursuing her claim, she lost all interest after the Hanseatic Court of Appeals ruled against her. While her lawyers prepared to argue the case before the West German Federal Supreme Court, Anderson divorced herself from further involvement. She was—if Anastasia—sixty-six when the verdict came, and faced a future as uncertain as anything in her tumultuous past. Completely reliant on the generosity of supporters and on the ministrations of a succession of elderly ladies who looked after her, Anderson had nothing—not even a legally recognized identity—to call her own. The aristocratic luxury of the von Kleist apartment, of Seeon, and of Xenia Georgievna’s Long Island estate now receded into an increasingly distant past, her realm reduced to the small chalet and its overgrown garden at the edge of the Black Forest, reduced to a reluctant tourist attraction, a living historical curiosity, a tantalizing question mark to be fought and argued over by a world fascinated by her existence.

  Anderson inside her chalet, 1960.

  There was, it is true, some brief diversion in these years, in the form of a Russian émigré named Alexei Miliukov, who arrived in Unterlengenhardt armed with a recommendation from Gleb Botkin. Miliukov provided Anderson with an irascible sparring partner as the two discussed her life and argued for hours about her case. Soon, Miliukov asked permission to tape their conversations for the sake of history, and surprisingly she agreed. These talks, in English, with a smattering of German, only occasionally dealt with issues substantive to her claim, but her comments were by turns amusing, outrageous, and unintentionally reflective. “You know,” she told Miliukov, “I’m not very pleasant, not very sugary.”7 She spoke with reluctance of her early years, though she would happily prattle off the names and tangled connections of various German aristocrats and offer running moral commentaries on their lives as she followed their exploits in the press. When Miliukov pressed her on events in Ekaterinburg, she almost always refused, saying, “Please not, please, not dirt!”8 At times, though, she said some startling things: she chastised Miliukov when he referred to her suicide attempt in 1920, declaring, “I never jumped into that canal!” and even told him proudly, “I own a bank.”9 She once referred to Kirill Vladimirovich’s wife, Grand Duchess Victoria Melita, as “a pig, a true swine,” and condemned her daughter Kira—who had come out publicly against her claim—by saying, “She has the mind of a waitress!” Most of her scorn, though, was reserved for “my mortal enemy” and “that Battenberg creature,” as she termed Lord Mountbatten. She seemed to blame him not only for Eugenia Smith but also for Massie’s book, for the loss of her court case, for all of those who had rejected her as Anastasia, even for the busloads of tourists who came to Unterlengenhardt; it was all, she insisted, a “plot” against her, to exhaust her, to drive her crazy.10

  Enemies, probably sent by Mountb
atten, she was sure, were all around her. She trusted no one at Unterlengenhardt. Anderson probably never had two more devoted supporters than Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg and Baroness Monica von Miltitz, one of the ladies who lived with her and attended to her needs, but to Miliukov she expressed nothing but scorn for the pair, constantly belittling them and warning that neither was to be trusted. The prince, she warned, “constantly plots against me,” and she made a point of swearing Miliukov to secrecy over her letters and plans because the dedicated Friedrich “is not to be trusted with anything ever!”11 As for Baroness von Miltitz, nothing she ever did was good enough for Anderson; if she distrusted Prince Friedrich, she seemed to positively loathe the baroness, calling her “a snake” and “an abuser.”12