We All Love A Mystery: Anastasia

This was originally published in 2007, but I've updated it very slightly, and I've added a "Word History" and the photo of Robert K. Massie's book below.  

I'm going to write this just for the fun of it, and I'm not going to go back and refresh my memory, so keep in mind, this is from memory... MY memory!!! If that isn't an alarm.... Anyway, if you're interested in the subject, or if you just want to check old Randy's facts, there are a lot of books and articles available in libraries, and probably even online.

It is said that we all love a mystery, if you don't believe me, just check the title of this blog. One of the mysteries of the 20th Century was the story of a woman known as "Anna Anderson." Anna Anderson "claimed" to be the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra. The story went on for decades, and it so captured the public attention, that it spawned a hit movie during the 1950s, starring Ingrid Bergman, and a television mini series in the 1980s, starring Amy Irving. I should note, the Ingrid Bergman movie was for the most part fiction, and was just loosely based upon the Anna Anderson story. The television mini series was more factual, but, in my opinion, was much too skewed toward Anderson's side of the story, especially when compared to evidence that has come about since the filming of the series. All of this "disclaimer" stuff being said....

First a little background:

In July of 1918, the Tsar, his family, and some servants were executed by a Bolshevik execution squad in Ekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains' area of Russia. The Bolsheviks (later known as "Communists") were never terribly open about the executions, and this all prompted sensational stories to crop up, ala Elvis sitings, and President Kennedy living in South America, undoubtedly next door to Hitler, another person "known" to have gone to South America (hey, maybe its the weather there?). The Bolshevik government did admit to executing the Tsar (or Czar, if you prefer), but they played it very cagey about the rest of the Czar's family. Over time, some of the Bolsheviks involved directly in the case wrote articles and books on the subject. The basic gist of these stories was that after the executions, the bodies were hauled off, and eventually, two bodies were burned, or at least they attempted to burn them. If I recall correctly, the stories all agreed that the Tsar's son, Alexei, had been one of the bodies that had been burned. The other body, a female, was even said to have been the Empress Alexandra herself, but most often, stories named either Maria or Anastasia, both were daughters of the Tsar and Tsarina. With such discrepancies, this was an open invitation to "conspiracy theories" and to people claiming to be various persons from the Tsar's family.

Circa 1920, in Berlin, Germany, a woman was fished out of one of the many canals in the city. She was hospitalized for quite some time. At some point, she was looking at a magazine that had a story about the Tsar and his family. She showed another lady, I believe another patient, if I remember right, a picture of the Tsar's family, and then asked the lady if she thought she resembled any of the Tsar's daughters. The lady mentioned Maria, and at some point, the woman said that she was Maria. Later, she changed the story and said she was Anastasia. Well, all of this caused a great stir. This "Anastasia" had numerous scars and this certainly began to give some sort of credence to her claim.

Essentially, her story was this:

One of the Bolshevik guards, whom she said was named Tschaikovsky (no music jokes, please!), rescued her from the execution, as she was only badly wounded. He and some of his family, including his mother, gathered together some belongings in a wagon, and, along with the sick and wounded daughter of the Tsar, headed off from the Ural Mountains to Rumania. Now, this journey was not exactly like going by covered wagon from Dallas to Forth Worth in 1875, but it had to be something more on the order of 1200 to 1500 miles. Eventually, they reached Bucharest, the Rumanian capital. The woman said that by that time, she was pregnant with Tschaikovsky's child. They got married in Bucharest, she gave birth (to a boy, I believe), Tschaikovsky was killed one night in a street fight, and she gave the baby up for adoption. She decided to go to Berlin to see her mother's relatives, but she was despondent and jumped into the canal. (The Empress Alexandra was a German by birth, being born as "Alix," a princess of Hessen. Her well known grandmother, however, was Queen Victoria of England, who, by the way, was also the grandmother of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II).

Over time, the story captured lots of press attention, and this newly found "Anastasia" drew some supporters for her claim. Some of these supporters were financially well off, and they took to supporting her in many ways. Over the years, she was in mental institutions on and off, as her behavior, often times even towards her benefactors, was bizarre, and included her running naked on the roof of an upscale apartment building or hotel. Eventually, she came to the United States, and it was then, if I recall, that she began to call herself "Anna Anderson," as a cover to keep the press and other people from learning her true identity. Many times, she seemed disinterested in proving to anyone who she claimed to be. She returned to Europe and lived in various areas of Germany, including the Black Forest region, where she lived in a rundown cottage and had something like 20 or 30 cats!!! The property smelled so bad, the neighbors complained to the authorities. Later still, she came back to the United States and married a man by the name of Jack Manahan in Virginia. Manahan has been said to have been a bit eccentric himself. She passed away in Virginia in like 1984, and her body was cremated. Manahan died like about two years later.

During her time back in Germany, which included World War II, she filed legal action in the German courts for her claim to be "Anastasia," and thus to be declared a legal heir to the Tsar. The initial action came prior to WWII, but the war interrupted the proceedings, which took up again after the war, continuing until like the 1970s!!! (I just don't recall when the case finally closed, but I believe it was the longest legal case in German history.) During the long legal affair, her ears were compared to photos of the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and many "experts" claimed that they matched. In the end, the court ruled that it had neither been proven that she was or was not Anastasia. Back to square one!

One of the contentious issues was the woman's ability to speak, or not speak, fluent Russian. The Grand Duchess Anastasia, and indeed all of the Tsar's children, spoke Russian with their father, and English with their mother. (By the way, Nicholas and Alexandra conversed in English!) The children were tutored in French by a Swiss teacher, and their own mother tutored them in German. During the many years of this whole episode, a few people claimed that they heard the woman speaking Russian. Most often, she told people that she refused to speak Russian, as Russians murdered her family. Many people agreed that she could understand Russian, even if she didn't offer to speak it.

With the fall of Communism in Russia, some people came forward claiming to have found the grave site of the Tsar and his family. In the early 1990s, the area was excavated, and skeletons were found. All sorts of testing was conducted, including DNA tests, and scientists and most folks were satisfied that the skeletons were indeed those of the Imperial family and servants; that is, the Imperial family minus two skeletons. (Did anybody check the closet?) Scientists concluded that Alexei's skeleton was NOT present. Some scientists concluded that the other missing skeleton was that of Maria, while other scientists concluded that it was Anastasia's skeleton that was missing. To my knowledge, that issue has never been clarified. Well, this sent the still present supporters of Anna Anderson into ecstasy, as with one female daughter being unaccounted for, this only helped their claim that she had in fact been Anastasia. With Anderson dead, and her body cremated, DNA testing seemed impossible.

Researchers found that Anna Anderson had had surgery in Virginia in the late 1970s or thereabouts. The surgery involved the removal of a section of her intestine. The hospital kept tissue samples from surgeries to help in research, and they had done so with Anderson's intestine. DNA testing showed that Anderson was NOT the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Her supporters, still persistent, wondered if the tissue sample could have been switched in some way over the years. The hospital procedures were examined up, down and sideways, and again, most scientists and historians were satisfied that the sample was indeed from Anna Anderson. Now, if I remember right, these tissue samples were not labeled out-and-out with the person's name, but with some kind of code number, which then had further cross references.

Then came even more devastating news to Anderson's supporters. Some background first: During the 1920s, after Anderson had claimed to be Anastasia, the Romanov and Hessen families sought to check out the woman's story. Alexandra's brother, Ernst, the Grand Duke of Hessen, hired a detective agency. After a while, it was reported that the woman claiming to be Anastasia was a missing Polish factory worker, named Franziska Schanzkowska. At one point, relatives of Schanzkowska were brought in, and a brother, standing a little distance from the woman, said that she was his sister, Franziska. Later, when asked to put his signature to an affidavit stating that the woman was his missing sister, he declined and said that he'd been mistaken in identifying the woman as his sister. Also at some point, I believe during the court proceedings in Germany, a woman from the Berlin area was brought in and testified that she had been the landlady for a woman by the name of Franziska Schanzkowska, who worked in a munitions factory during World War I. The woman had been severely wounded when she dropped a grenade or some sort of explosive device, actually killing a co-worker. The woman left home one day and never returned, but the landlady read of the mysterious woman fetched from the canal a few days later, noting that Schanzkowska was wearing the same type of clothing described in the newspaper story. She also supposedly identified a picture of the woman as Schanzkowska.

Well, after the DNA tests on the intestinal tissue convinced most people that Anderson was not Anastasia, the remaining question was, "Who was she?" After Alexandra's brother, Ernst, had hired the detective and the Schanzkowska woman was put forward as the claimant's real name, the Hessens and the Romanovs basically didn't bother much with the case again. Apparently, they were satisfied that the woman was not their relative. Unlike in the Ingrid Bergman movie, Anastasia's grandmother (Tsar Nicholas' mother) NEVER met with the woman.

In the 1990s, a grand nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska was located in Hamburg. He gave blood, and his DNA matched the tissue sample's DNA from the hospital. Further, after Jack Manahan died, many of his belongings were sold. A woman bought a book, and said that when she got the book home and went through it, an envelope was tucked inside. The envelope had "Anastasia's hair" written on the front. Inside were some hair follicles. The handwriting on the envelope was determined to have been Manahan's. DNA was able to be extracted from the hair follicles, and it too matched the intestinal tissue from the hospital. Anderson's supporters were devastated. Even with all of the evidence, some still claimed that the evidence had in some way been tampered with, and that Anderson's general demeanor was such that she could not possibly have been a Polish factory worker of peasant heritage. Over the years, too, supporters from different generations said that she could not have known some of the intimate details of the Imperial family without having been there as Anastasia.

Besides the grenade dropped in the munitions plant, Anderson also dropped another bomb later on. She claimed that Alexandra's brother, Ernst, aka Ernie, came to visit them during World War One! Now, during World War One, Russia and Germany were enemies! Ernie was a Grand Duke, and a general in the German Army. To cross lines and visit the Tsar and his sister would have been treason, unless of course, it was approved by none other than Kaiser Wilhelm, who was a cousin to both Nicholas* and Alexandra. Ernie's diaries made no mention of any such visit, nor was any such record found in the Russian or German archives, nor did Nicholas make any mention of such an occasion in his diaries. During the war, there was speculation that Russia and Germany might try to reach some peace accord, but no record of such has been found that involved Ernie. Further, Ernie was stationed on the Western Front (France/Belgium) for the entire war, if I remember correctly; not that he couldn't have been sent eastward quickly for a brief meeting with the Tsar. Then again, there was that nasty thing of having to get through the Russian lines and then back to the German lines. Such a problem would have required many people having some knowledge of what was going on, and no one ever surfaced with such information.

As to Franziska Schanzkowska, she was born in the Posen area (Poznan, in Polish). At the time of her birth, Posen was within the boundaries of Germany. Many people in the area had a passing knowledge of German, as Posen had been under German domination for more than a century. During much of Anderson's life, she used German as her main language, but later she learned English, at least to some extent, and she used this broken English to converse. As to Russian, there is no definite proof that she ever spoke the language, a little, or "like a native," as one supporter claimed. Polish and Russian are both Slavic languages, and not all that different, which is perhaps why she could UNDERSTAND Russian, but not speak it to answer back. As a cover, or perhaps in her own mixed up mind (even many of her supporters admitted she had mental problems, but they always attributed these problems to the terrible ordeal she'd been through during the executions and the aftermath), she said that she'd never speak Russian again, as Russians had murdered her family.

Just one last thing, if a grave with a communist had been uncovered, would it have contained a "Red skeleton?"


 * For a couple of centuries, the Russian Romanov dynasty had frequently married directly into German noble families, or they were related to German nobles in other ways. For instance, Tsar Nicholas' mother, Marie, was the daughter of the king of Denmark, but he too was a German prince, and her mother was a princess from Hessen, just as her future daughter-in-law Alexandra would be.

 

Photo is of the originally released edition of Robert K. Massie's "The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, published by Random House, 1995, which I bought when it was released. The dust jacket is a little worn now.

WORD HISTORY:

Lye-This noun for the alkali liquid used for cleaning (also in dried form in more modern times), is distantly related to "lavatory." ^ It goes back to Indo European "leue," which had the notion of "wash, cleanse." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "laugo," meaning "bathe, wash," but also by extension, "the solution used to bathe, soap." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "leag," meaning "alkaline liquid for washing." Eventually the "g" sound died out in English, leaving the modern form "lye," and "lye soap" was commonly used for washing for many centuries. The other Germanic languages have: German "Lauge" (lye), Low German Saxon and Dutch "loog" (lye), Icelandic "laug" (bathing pool), Norwegian "laug" (antiquated for "bath"), Swedish "lög," (antiquated for "bath"), Danish "lørdag" (literally "wash day" =Saturday, Swedish has "lördag" and Norwegian has "lørdag," and Icelandic has "Laugardagur"). I could not find a form in Frisian.  

^ "Lavatory" is a borrowing by English, but it originally meant "sink with flowing water," which shows the connection to "cleaning, washing," but that meaning also later led to the connection to "wash room" or "bathroom," although in my time, many plumbers still called the bathroom sink the "lav."