by Greg King
The court also heard from those who, like Rathlef-Keilmann with her story that the real Franziska had been killed by Georg Grossmann, claimed to know what had happened to the missing factory worker. There was a certain Bruno Grandsitzki, who thirty-eight-years after the fact claimed that he had met Franziska in July 1920 in Danzig, at a time when she was actually a patient at Dalldorf. According to this story, she had found employment as a servant and was sailing for England with several other young women aboard a ship called Premier. Grandsitzki was nothing if not remarkable in his alleged recall of a thoroughly unremarkable and brief encounter with a woman whom he did not know and had no reason to remember, for he volunteered that she had even specified to him that her new employers lived in London, on Bedford Road.74 A thorough investigation into this tale, which, as the German magazine Der Spiegel noted, “has become increasingly tall with the passage of time,” yielded no results.75 The ever-hopeful Dominique Auclères, stepping into the gullible void vacated by Rathlef-Keilmann, pursued this tale with a vengeance: she checked passenger manifests of ships that had operated out of Danzig; combed through registry ledgers; and pored over immigration files in Great Britain. None, not surprisingly, contained any reference to Franziska Schanzkowska.76
Then there were three former nurses, who emerged from the shadows to briefly take the witness stand in 1966. Charlotte Janus, Margarete Binner, and Emma Bezug all said that they had worked at an asylum in Herrenprotsch near Breslau, and claimed to have recognized a newspaper photograph of Franziska as a woman who, they insisted, had been incarcerated in their institution from 1929 to 1934—a time when she was actually in America and then at Ilten near Hannover. Like the tale woven by Grandzitski, no evidence ever emerged to support this rather contradictory claim.77
Such stories became commonplace in Franziska’s saga, evidence not of some mysterious fate but rather78 of the hold her claim held for a fascinated public. People not only wanted her tale to be true, they also wanted—no matter how contradictory or absurd their accounts—to be part of it themselves, to affix themselves to the greatest living mystery of the twentieth century. “If he can be considered part of her story,” Der Spiegel presciently commented of Grandzitski, “he can become a part of history. Lie would be the wrong word for it all.”
But the Hamburg courts weren’t quite so easily taken in, or as forgiving as most of the public. In their 1961 verdict, the Hanseatic Landesgericht Court not only ruled against the plaintiff’s claim to be Anastasia but also on a counterclaim brought by Berenberg-Gossler that she was, in fact, Franziska Schanzkowska. This last contention, they said, had also not been sufficiently established, though they thought it “seems highly probable.”79 It hadn’t been sufficiently established because, in truth, Berenberg-Gossler hadn’t really tried very hard to prove it, as an examination of the evidence now makes clear; instead, he spent most of his time in court attempting to refute those who claimed to have seen a rescued Anastasia in this or that province or country, or arguing against Franziska’s contention that Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig had secretly visited Russia in 1916.
And Franziska’s family? They did their best to avoid the entire spectacle. By the time of the Hamburg trials, Maria Juliana had died, and Valerian, though still living on the family farm, was inaccessible in Soviet-controlled Poland. In 1959, Hans Hermann Krampff, opposition lawyer in the case, wrote to Gertrude, “Research conducted in the interval confirms that you were not alone in recognizing Frau Anderson as your sister Franziska at the 1938 encounter. Your brothers and sister did so as well, but refrained from admitting this so as not to obstruct your sister’s career. . . . There is nothing to be feared if you now tell the truth, as the term for any judicial punishment has passed.”80 And so Gertrude repeated her story, told of how she had recognized Franziska, but not so Felix, who, perhaps bound by the lie to which he had committed himself in his 1927 sworn affidavit, continually ignored legal requests that he participate in the court proceedings. Attempting to convince him, Gertrude’s daughter Margarete Ellerik wrote to Felix, “It’s not everyone who can say he has a full-blooded sister whom powerful and important people have mistaken for decades as the Tsar’s daughter!”81 But nothing would change Felix’s mind, and he never gave any formal statement during the trials.
The lies, the silence, the reversals, the refusal to commit, it all played into Franziska’s hands. She’d been unmasked, recognized, identified—even admitted that she was a fraud—and still, amazingly, she managed to survive it all. It is a remarkable testament to the extraordinary power of this most romantic of twentieth-century myths and to Franziska’s extraordinary capabilities. People wanted to believe, and believe they did—even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. In the end, for much of the world, Franziska Schanzkowska, this former “peasant,” this farm girl from the provinces, this “insane” factory worker, became Anastasia.
Epilogue
After so many decades of apparently compelling evidence in Anna Anderson’s favor, so many recognitions, asserted memories, and minute details supporting her claim, the 1994 DNA results shocked many who had believed that she was Anastasia. It was simply impossible, Gleb Botkin once insisted, to “mistake a Polish peasant for a Grand Duchess.”1 Marina and Richard Schweitzer, his daughter and son-in-law, echoed the sentiment: although they never questioned the integrity of the scientists or the actual genetic tests, they rejected the conclusions. The bowel tissue tested, Schweitzer insisted, “did not come from the body of the Anna Anderson we knew. It had to be tampered with.” It was not so much the claimant’s exclusion as Anastasia that they protested, but rather the suggestion that she had been Franziska. “For all of us who knew her,” Schweitzer said, “there’s no way she could be a Polish peasant. That didn’t match the rational human experience of the people who knew her.”2 The idea that she had been Franziska Schanzkowska, he declared, was “devastating,” “an insult.”3
Perhaps the identification of Anna Anderson as Franziska Schanzkowska seemed so unlikely because, like most apparently extraordinary things, people expected the solution to the mystery to be as fantastic as her claim. The DNA results and their stark scientific conclusions did nothing to address the lingering questions: How, the claimant’s supporters asked, did a rural farm girl randomly embody so many elements that seemingly pointed to her identity as Anastasia? What were the odds that she would be lucky enough to be the correct height to match the diminutive grand duchess, and share not only her hair and eye color but also the hallux valgus? How could she amass such seemingly intimate knowledge of the imperial family and life at court? How did she apparently develop a talent for languages, or learn to play the piano? How could she convincingly present herself as a person of refined character, allegedly versed in the intricacies of etiquette? How, Anderson’s supporters asked—and continue to ask—could almost seventy-five years of such accumulated evidence refuting the idea that she had been Franziska Schanzkowska suddenly be cast aside in favor of a string of genetic codes? Was every contradiction to be ignored? Every recognition of the claimant as Anastasia ruled a mistake? Coincidence, they suggested, had its limits, and this tangled case couldn’t be put down to mere chance.
But there were assumptions at play here, erroneous assumptions, resting on decades of erroneous information. People believed that the recognitions were compelling, that she’d simply known too much—“The Man with the Pockets,” all of the answers to Prince Sigismund’s questions—not to believe that she was Anastasia; people believed she possessed impressive linguistic abilities, that she’d convinced too many experts who studied her handwriting and her photographs, to think it was all a mistake. And people believed that a “peasant” such as Franziska was incapable of learning languages, of assimilating information; there was no way to reconcile her family’s statements that she’d never been pregnant and hadn’t been wounded during the AEG accident with the woman rescued from the Landwehr Canal. It was all wrong, of course, on both sides, but no one knew the truth, a tr
uth that lay hidden, ignored, and suppressed as the myth took shape and swelled into a lasting cultural phenomenon.
People seized on contradictions: Franziska supposedly wore larger shoes than the claimant, she was taller, fatter, her hair color different, assertions never established in court, subjective memories advanced as reasons to dismiss the DNA results.4 And there were other tests, they insisted, that stood in direct opposition to the 1994 verdict. In the 1970s, for example, after the ruling by the West German Federal Supreme Court rejecting Franziska’s appeal, Dr. Moritz Furtmayr conducted two photographic studies of the claimant. The first, utilizing a system he developed called the “Personen-Identifizierungskartei” or “P.I.K. Method,” a kind of early Identikit, measured what Furtmayr said were cardinal points on the face—the depth and distance of certain features whose relationship never altered over time.5 According to Furtmayr, the claimant was Anastasia; the P.I.K. Method, he said, was accepted as valid scientific evidence within the West German legal system.6 Furtmayr also compared photographs of Franziska’s right ear with that of the grand duchess. He identified seventeen points of concordance between the two women, five more, he said, than required by West German law to establish identity.7
This was clearly a problem. In a 1930 letter to Princess Xenia Georgievna, Empress Alexandra’s sister Victoria, marchioness of Milford Haven, wrote:
One insuperable obstacle to my acceptance of the question of identity is that A’s ears were not the same shape as Anastasia’s, which I remember very well and which my sister Alix and I used to say were a case of atavism as hers closely resembled those of my father’s brother and were unlike the ordinary ones. Both Irene and my brother are in agreement with me in this opinion. Now it is an acknowledged fact that the modeling, especially of the curl over and lobe of an ear, remains unaltered from the day of birth of a person until death.8
Ernst Ludwig agreed, as did Victoria’s son Lord Mountbatten, who again raised this objection in a letter to his cousin Prince Ludwig of Hesse.9 Michael Thornton broke news of Furtmayr’s tests to Lord Louis Mountbatten. “As he read it, his face was a picture of doubt and confusion,” Thornton remembered. “But this isn’t possible!” Mountbatten finally declared. “No impostor could be as lucky as that!”10
On the surface there were two immediate objections to Furtmayr’s tests. He believed that previous photographic comparisons of the claimant utilized an image wrongly printed in reverse; when corrected, he found that her ear matched that of Anastasia.11 In fact, the image in question—a profile photograph of Franziska taken at Dalldorf in 1920—had not been reversed, rendering his claims of a match problematic. Then, too, he used a photograph of Marie Nikolaievna, not Anastasia, in declaring a match with the claimant’s ear.12 Furtmayr, now deceased, is a bit of a shadowy figure. He worked as a carpenter, then a cook, then a lumberjack before taking a course through the International Detective Training Institute, a correspondence school in Washington, D.C., that regularly advertised its services to “train at home” and “earn big money” in the back of popular magazines and was apparently unaccredited by any organization.13 Furtmayr’s credentials are not known, but the problems in his study raise serious concerns about its results.14
Or take a 1994 test conducted by Professor Peter Vanezis of the Forensic Department of London’s Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School. Vanezis and five colleagues studied six photographs of unidentified ears against an archival image of Anastasia. Five of the six men believed that Franziska’s ears were the “most likely” match to those of Anastasia, though there was one dissenter. Even so, as Vanezis pointed out, this was “a possibility” but not one that could be considered definitive identification. Vanezis noted that these results were “based on the assumption” that individual human ears were unique and retained their characteristics from birth to death—the reasoning argued by Victoria, marchioness of Milford Haven, and echoed by Furtmayr.15 And assumption it certainly was, for it lacks any scientific basis. Andre Moenssens, a legal professor specializing in forensic anthropological evidence, notes that the assumption of ear individuality “has never been empirically established. There is not a single published scientific study that establishes that ears are, in fact, different and distinct and that such individuality can be verified through comparisons.”16
Nothing, in the end, was particularly compelling, and these tests were refuted, as ever in this case, by others. In 1994, British producer Julian Nott commissioned a number of studies—including that of Vanezis—for his documentary on Anna Anderson. Geoffrey Oxlee, a British specialist in facial comparisons, conducted a simple computer comparison of the only known pre-1920 image of Franziska and the claimant, superimposing the two to correlate their features. There was, he noted, variation in the ears, but suggested that if the two images represented different individuals, the disparity should be much greater. He found the evidence “consistent” with the belief that the claimant was Franziska. Dr. Peter French, a forensic phonetician of London’s City University, analyzed Franziska’s speech patterns as recorded in the 1960s by Alexei Miliukov. Of a definitive Russian accent there was no conclusive proof, though the way in which she pronounced the letter r suggested a Slavic, not German, origin, but, French added importantly, this same sound was “the standard pronunciation” in the area where Franziska had been brought up. And David Ellen, former head of Scotland Yard’s Questioned Document Section, compared the claimant’s handwriting to that of Anastasia. He concluded, “I find no evidence that Anna Anderson was in fact Grand Duchess Anastasia. When I say no evidence, I mean essentially that the writings are different in a number of respects, significantly different.”17
It was all so like the Hamburg trials, with experts arguing opposing points in what was largely a subjective game. And what of the DNA, the crushing results that contradicted so much of what history had been led to believe? Three independent laboratories—Forensic Science Services, Pennsylvania State University, and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology—tested biological materials from the claimant. Nuclear DNA testing of the bowel tissue by Forensic Science Services excluded any possibility that the claimant had been a child of Nicholas and Alexandra; mitochondrial DNA tests on three separate slices of the Charlottesville tissue by Forensic Science Services and by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology excluded the possibility that she had been a matrilineal descendant of Empress Alexandra; and the mitochondrial DNA profile derived by Forensic Science Services and by Pennsylvania State University from two different samples of the claimant’s hair also excluded any genetic relationship to Empress Alexandra. But four additional tests had confirmed her genetic relationship with the Schanzkowsky family. The mitochondrial DNA profiles derived by Forensic Science Services for both the bowel tissue and for the hair matched that established for Karl Maucher; the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, working with a different slice of bowel tissue, discovered an identical mitochondrial DNA sequence matching the Maucher profile; and Pennsylvania State University also obtained an identical mitochondrial DNA profile confirming a genetic link between the claimant and Franziska’s great-nephew.
Could any of this be challenged or dismissed? In 1994, Forensic Science Services analyzed six short tandem repeats, or STRs, in their nuclear DNA comparisons that had excluded Franziska from being a child of Nicholas and Alexandra; within a few years, the science had evolved—and continues to evolve—to more reliable ten-, twelve-, and twenty-point tests. Does this invalidate the 1994 results? No. Analysis of additional points might increase the odds of a genetic relationship, but nothing will ever change the four mismatches Gill’s team found, not just with the emperor and the empress but also with the remains of the three grand duchesses exhumed from the Koptyaki grave. Franziska matched none of them, a scientific impossibility had she really been Anastasia. The four mismatches remain immutable regardless of the number of points analyzed.
Producer Maurice Philip Remy obtained a glass slide of Franziska’s blood taken on June 6, 1951,
by hematologist Dr. Stefan Sandkuhler with the idea of seeing if she had been a hemophilia carrier; half of the slide was sent to Dr. Charles Ginther at the University of California at Berkeley and half to Drs. Bernd Hermann, Jens Rameckers, and Susanne Hummel at the Georg-August Institute for Anthropology at the University of Göttingen in Germany.18 This was compared against blood samples given by Princess Sophie of Hannover, sister of Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh, and by Margarete Ellerik, Karl Maucher’s mother and Gertrude’s daughter.19 The profile for Princess Sophie matched that of her brother, while that of Margarete Ellerik matched that of her son; but the profile the German scientists obtained from the slide—and sent to Ginther—matched neither sequence.20 Did this mean that Franziska wasn’t related to the Schanzkowsky family? No. The slide, which bore the name “Anastasia” scratched onto its surface, had been stored without any protective covering, leading to a corrupted sample.21 So the results meant nothing, but analysis of Princess Sophie’s mitochondrial DNA profile confirmed that of her brother, while the blood sample from Margarete Ellerik established without question the Schanzkowsky profile found in Karl Maucher.