Anna Anderson, the "Unknown Miss" who pretends to be Anastasia Romanov

Stéphane Bern, edited by Alexis Patri 7:37 pm, December 23, 2021

Evoking the life of Anna Anderson is telling a story in two episodes.

The first takes place in the summer of 1918 in Yekaterinburg, 1,500 kilometers east of Moscow.

In mid-July, the Villa Ipatiev has been welcoming the fallen Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra and their five children for several weeks.

And among them, Anastasia Romanov, the youngest of the couple's four daughters, then 17 years old.

The house is a less and less gilded prison for the imperial family, carried away in 1917 by the Russian Revolution. 

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The Romanovs live there cloistered with their last servants, cut off from the world by the Cheka, the political police of the Bolshevik regime.

In the summer of 1918, when the civil war raged between the red power and the white armies, those of the Russians who remained loyal to the tsar, it was decided to put an end to the Romanovs.

The birth of "Mademoiselle Inconnue"

During the night of July 16 to 17, the Tsar and his family are awakened, and dragged to the cellar with their last servants.

A commando shoots them down with rifle shots, before killing the dying with a bullet in the head or with bayonets.

The bodies are then transported about twenty kilometers away, burned with acid and gasoline, then buried in the woods.

The second episode begins 18 months later in Berlin, on February 27, 1920, with the miraculous rescue of a young woman who has just jumped into the canal.

In the hospital, impossible to determine his identity.

Prostrate, the young woman has no papers.

For the staff and for the doctors of the psychiatric hospital in Dalldorf, where she will spend two years, she becomes' Fraülein unbekannt "," Mademoiselle Inconnue ".

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But, if it is impossible to identify him, his case begins to speak. The few German words she ends up saying have a tinge of Russian accent. And, stranger still, his body and his head bear the scars of old and ugly wounds. A rumor then spread like wildfire in the midst of White Russians, then in the press. The unknown from the Dalldorf would be Anastasia Romanov!

Several figures of the Old Imperial Regime travel to meet "Fraülein unbekannt", without anything conclusive.

Some believe they recognize it.

Others, like Prince Youssoupov (who remained famous for having assassinated Rasputin), no.

After meeting the young woman, this relative of the Romanovs wrote to a friend: "I affirm that she is not Anastasia, but an adventurer, a sick hysteric and a terrifying actress. I do not understand how anyone might doubt it. "

The Anna Tchaikovsky Hypothesis

Yusupov has not finished falling from the clouds, because the story is growing. Now restored, the young woman ensures that she is the last of the Romanovs, yet shot 18 months earlier. His defenders construct an incredible version to explain his survival: the diamonds sewn into his corset would have stopped the killers' bullets. Taken with pity, one of the guards of the villa Ipatiev, would then have discreetly exfiltrated her towards Germany, before marrying her by giving her a new identity: Anna Tchaikovsky.

The press gets involved, the public ignites, and the versions multiply until no one understands anything.

In 1927, a private investigator, Martin Khnopff, nevertheless made convincing conclusions.

According to him, Anna Tchaikovsky is not Anastasia Romanov, but Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish worker injured by the explosion of a grenade in her arms factory.

Traumatized to the point of being declared demented, Franziska disappeared from a Berlin asylum in 1920, before reappearing claiming to be Anastasia. 

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For many, the cause is heard. And, in October 1928, 12 of the tsar's closest relatives called the whole affair a fairy tale, adding that "the memory of our loved ones would be tarnished if we allowed this whimsical story to be taken seriously." But Anna Tchaikovsky's supporters do not admit defeat and embark on an endless cycle of trials that will never lead to anything. And for good and simple reason: while it is not possible to prove that Anna is Anastasia, it is not possible to prove the other way around.

The cruelest thing about this story is undoubtedly the fact that Anna Tchaikovsky seems more tossed about than anything between her opponents and her supporters.

Of course, his assertions give him access to worldly circles, where we love to chat about his fate as a fallen tsarina.

From Berlin to the United States, we are in a hurry to see it.

A martyred princess, who wouldn't want her at her table? 

American Life Anna Anderson and the Emergence of Truth

But social events do not change his mental state.

Anna Anderson, the name she adopted to deceive the media for a while, is not doing well and crises multiply throughout her life.

As in 1930, when she kills her familiar parrot before running naked on its roof, then taking refuge in a room that the firefighters must attack with an ax, before taking her to the hospital against her will. 

Episodic internments increased until 1968: at the age of 70, Anna Anderson then went to the United States where she married a history professor twenty years younger, John Manahan.

The relatively wealthy couple settled in Virginia.

Yet he lives in improbable conditions, among the garbage that accumulates in their garden.

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In 1983, a court ordered the internment of Anna Anderson, then 86 years old.

Which causes a last incredible episode: her husband takes her from the hospital and the couple sets off on a three-day run that triggers a police alert in 13 different states.

Finally found, Anna died a few months later of pneumonia.

The end of the story will not be discovered until much later.

In 1991, the Russian Academy of Sciences carried out excavations in the Koptiaki forest, where the imperial family had been buried. There are seven bodies there whose ages and injuries match those of the Romanovs. This will be confirmed by genetic analyzes. Three years later, the DNA of Anna Anderson is compared with that of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, related to the Romanovs through his grandmother.

The result is clear: Anna Anderson was no Romanov.

Another test, which this time compares its DNA to that of a descendant of Franziska Schanzkowska, the worker injured in 1920 while handling a grenade, is however positive.

Anna Anderson was not a miraculous princess, but a worker who was forever traumatized by an accident, and caught in a gear from which she never managed to escape.

Martin Khnopff, the detective who identified him as early as 1927, had been right from the start.

Too bad for the American studios, and too bad for the beautiful legends too.