The Berlin Asylum Patient Who Claimed to Be Grand Duchess Anastasia for Sixty-Three Years and Was Disproved by DNA Eleven Years After Her Death

In the night of 17 February 1920 a Berlin policeman pulled an unconscious young woman from the Landwehr Canal near the Bendler Bridge. She refused to give her name. She was committed to the Dalldorf Asylum in Wittenau under the designation Fräulein Unbekannt (“Miss Unknown”). She spent the next two years there.

In 1922 another patient at Dalldorf showed her an illustrated magazine article about the murdered Russian imperial family — Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina, and their five children, executed at Yekaterinburg in July 1918. The young woman, who had until then been silent for two years, looked at the photograph of the third daughter Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna and said the resemblance was strong because she was Anastasia. She had, the new account ran, survived the basement massacre and been smuggled to Berlin by a sympathetic Bolshevik guard.

What she had going for her

She was the right age. She spoke fluent German (Anastasia had been taught German by tutors) and broken English. She showed knowledge of Romanov family details that contemporaries argued she could not plausibly have known from public sources alone. Several surviving members of the extended Romanov family — including Anastasia’s first cousin Princess Xenia Georgievna and the Tsarina’s lady-in-waiting Lili Dehn — declared her genuine after meeting her.

She had no documents. Her face had been damaged by the canal rescue. Her body bore scars consistent with bayonet wounds (or, equivalently, with industrial-accident injuries from a Berlin munitions factory).

The opposition — including Anastasia’s grandmother Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and her aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna — declared her an impostor after also meeting her. The opposition was based partly on observed physical mismatches and partly on Olga’s recognition of the young woman’s strong Polish-Slavic accent in Russian.

What she had going against her

A 1927 private investigation hired by the Romanov family identified her as Franziska Schanzkowska, born 1896 in Borowihlas, Prussian Pomerania (now Borowy Las, Poland), a former employee of the Berlin AEG munitions factory who had been injured by a hand-grenade explosion at the factory in 1916 and had subsequently been institutionalised in a Berlin asylum in 1917 before disappearing in early 1920 — three weeks before the canal rescue. Franziska’s brother Felix Schanzkowski met Anna Anderson in 1927 and identified her as his sister.

She refused to admit it. She maintained the Anastasia claim through forty-five years of German civil litigation. The final court ruling, in 1970, was that she had not proved her identity as Anastasia — but had also not been proved to be Schanzkowska. The case was indeterminate.

She moved to Virginia in 1968, married the American historian Jack Manahan, and died at his Charlottesville home on 12 February 1984. She was cremated; the ashes were placed in the Manahan family plot in Castle Seeon, Bavaria.

1994

The Romanov family remains were discovered in Yekaterinburg in 1991. The 1992 forensic analysis identified Tsar Nicholas, the Tsarina, and three of the five children — but two daughters were missing from the grave. The case for Anastasia’s escape became, briefly, scientifically respectable.

DNA samples from Anna Anderson — preserved tissue from a 1979 intestinal surgery at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville — were tested in 1994 by Peter Gill at the UK Forensic Science Service. The mitochondrial DNA matched Karl Maucher, grandnephew of Franziska Schanzkowska, and was incompatible with the Romanov maternal line (which was matched conclusively to Prince Philip, great-nephew of the Tsarina).

Anna Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska. The 2007 discovery of the remaining two Romanov children’s bodies in a second Yekaterinburg grave eliminated any possibility that Anastasia had escaped.

She had spent sixty-three years insisting otherwise.