Anna Anderson: How a fake Anastasia deceived the world

Berlin, February 17, 1920. The wind chills to the bone, and the dark, oily water of the Landwehr Canal seems like the only way out. The girl takes a step off the bridge. A splash, shouts from passers-by, a police whistle. She is pulled out. She shivers, refuses to give her name, and hides her face. In the pockets of her coat - no documents, no letters. Only emptiness. She will spend the next year and a half in the Dalldorf psychiatric clinic, hiding under a blanket from doctors. And then she will utter the words that will disturb half of Europe for seventy years.

The Birth of a Ghost

After the execution of the royal family in the basement of the Ipatiev House, the world went crazy. The Russian emigration, scattered across Paris, Berlin, and Harbin, was suffocating with despair. They needed a miracle. And the miracle materialized in a ward for the violent.

At first, she was just "Fräulein Unbekannt" - Unknown. Thin, with a haunted look and strange scars on her body. One day, one of the patients, flipping through an illustrated magazine, pointed to a photograph of Nicholas II's daughters. The nurse looked closer. Whispers crept through the corridors. Rumors are a terrible force, especially when they fall on the fertile ground of longing for a lost homeland.

Soon, streams of emigrants were drawn to Dalldorf. Former ladies-in-waiting, officers, barons. They peered into the face of the Unknown, trying to find features of the shot Grand Duchess Anastasia. And, most surprisingly, many found them.

Theater of Other People's Memories

Do you know what is most frightening in this story? Details. The girl, who called herself Anna Anderson (it is under this name that she will go down in history as the most famous false Anastasia), demonstrated amazing knowledge.

She did not speak Russian. She justified herself by saying that the sound of her native language triggered a panic attack, reminding her of the night of the murder. Sounds like a cheap excuse from a fraudster, doesn't it? But at the same time, she understood Russian. She knew where the secret staircases were located in the Winter Palace. She remembered the nicknames that the Romanovs used only behind the closed doors of the nursery. During meetings with the Tsar's relatives, she could casually mention the color of the dress her aunt wore to tea in 1914.

How? From where? Historians are still arguing. Some believe that she was trained for years by enterprising emigrants who decided to get their hands on the mythical "tsarist gold" in European banks. Others believe in the phenomenal memory of a mentally ill person who absorbed the stories of clinic visitors and made them their own.

A Trial Lasting a Lifetime

In 1925, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the sister of Nicholas II, arrived in Berlin. She spent several days with Anna. She peered into her eyes, looking for that very "Romanov" blue color. She didn't find it. Olga left with the words: "My niece is dead. This woman is an unfortunate patient, but she is not Anastasia."

But the flywheel had already been launched. A court formed around Anna. Sponsors were found who paid for her accommodation in castles. The longest trial in German history began. For thirty-two years, Anna Anderson proved her right to be called Romanov. The courts demanded documents that did not exist, ordered anthropometric examinations, and compared the shape of her ears.

She was unbearable. Capricious, imperious, prone to hysterics. She could kick a benefactor out of the house if she didn't like the tone of his voice. "Real royal blood!" - her supporters admired. "An ordinary boor," - the skeptics retorted.

Genetics Doesn't Read Bedtime Stories

We love beautiful endings. Hollywood endings where the princess is saved from bullets thanks to a corset sewn with diamonds. But reality usually smells of carbolic acid and a hospital ward. Anna Anderson died in the USA in 1984, without ever receiving official recognition. Her ashes were scattered, seemingly putting an end to it.

And in 1994, a small container was brought to the laboratory of Oxford University. Inside - a sample of Anna's intestinal tissue, miraculously preserved in a Virginia hospital after a long-ago operation. Next to it, a blood sample of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a direct relative of the Romanovs, was placed.

Science is merciless. No matches. The DNA test destroyed the myth that had been built for decades.

Who are you, Franziska?

So who was she? Genetics also gave an answer to this question. Anna's DNA matched the DNA of Karl Maucher, the great-nephew of the Polish peasant Franziska Schanzkowska.

Franziska worked in Berlin at a factory producing explosives. In 1916, there was an explosion there. Her fiancé died before her eyes, and she herself suffered severe head and body injuries. The very "scars from bayonets" that she later showed to doctors. After the factory, there was depression, wandering, an attempted suicide on the Landwehr Canal bridge.

Franziska was not an evil genius. Perhaps she was just a deeply broken person. Her personal madness coincided perfectly with the collective madness of the era. People wanted so badly to believe that death was not the end, that they themselves put a crown on the head of a sick woman. And she wore this crown to the very end. Because being a surviving Grand Duchess is much easier than being a crippled Polish worker from whom the war took everything.