The Resurrection of the Romanovs (36 page)

Arguments about the claimant’s capabilities in Russian and in English did nothing to establish the truth of what were, after all, decades of conflicting assertions. Then there was the question of French: Anastasia had certainly learned it, though not very successfully, as Gilliard had admitted, but aside from the single instance of ordering breakfast for herself and Agnes Gallagher in Paris in 1928, Anderson had demonstrated no familiarity with the language.
23
Not until 1960 did a second episode occur, during a meeting with Dominique Auclères and Tatiana Botkin. Auclères wrote that Anderson had spontaneously spoken the language and that “her French pronunciation was perfect.” But what had the claimant said? Auclères had poured tea and asked,
“Du lait d’abord?”
(Milk first?) To this Anderson replied, “
Oh, oui, merci
.”
24
These two words, whether pronounced perfectly or not, scarcely offered any evidence that the claimant was familiar with the French language.

But most of the court’s time was taken up with the question of German. If Anderson’s supporters sometimes offered tenuous and unreliable assertions regarding her linguistic knowledge, her critics were just as guilty of attempting to rewrite history to disguise Anastasia’s familiarity with German, especially when it became apparent that this was the language in which the claimant seemed most comfortable. Thus Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna later insisted, “My nieces knew no German at all,” adding, “German was never spoken in the family.”
25
This was wrong, but it was insignificant compared to the contradictory statements offered by those who had met and rejected Anderson. In 1922, Baroness Buxhoeveden declared that Anastasia “hardly knew any words of German, and she pronounced them with a strong Russian accent.”
26
Six years later, though, and in the midst of controversy over Anderson’s claim, Buxhoeveden changed her story, now insisting that when it came to German, Anastasia “did not know it at all.”
27
The same thing happened with tutor Charles Sidney Gibbes. In 1919 he recalled that all of the grand duchesses had spoken “German, but badly.”
28
After meeting Anderson, though, he insisted that German “was a language the true Grand Duchess Anastasia could not speak.”
29

The worst offender was Pierre Gilliard. If he had not filled his
La Fausse Anastasie
with blatant lies and inaccuracies, as many of Anderson’s supporters charged, he—more than anyone else—was responsible for the linguistic mess that the Hamburg tribunals had to sort through. In his first book,
Thirteen Years at the Russian Court
, published in 1921, before he knew of Anderson’s claim, Gilliard insisted that the children “never had German lessons.”
30
He may have done so for political reasons, as the last quarter of the book advanced the novel and quite untrue theory that Germany and German agents had been behind the executions of the imperial family. He corrected the error in
La Fausse Anastasie
, reporting Anastasia’s German lessons with tutor Erich Kleinenberg, but then confused the issue by insisting, some fifty pages later, that Anastasia “did not speak German at all.”
31
He soon abandoned even this contradictory position, declaring in newspaper articles that Anastasia “spoke German not at all,” and insisting in interviews in his last years that the grand duchess had known “not one word of German.”
32

The exercise books purchased by Ian Lilburn resolved this dilemma. Item 8 was a thirty-two-page book labeled “A. Romanova, February 6, 1917, Tsarskoye Selo,” in which Anastasia had continued the German lessons begun with Kleinenberg in 1912, practicing the language in Gothic script. These lessons continued, without Kleinenberg, at Tobolsk.
33
And there was more: though Gilliard had denied Anastasia’s German, the Oberlandesgericht Court discovered timetables in his possession for her lessons at Tobolsk, which indicated that she had continued to work on the language through the beginning of 1918.
34

Still, this linguistic nightmare did nothing to resolve the issue of Anderson’s claim. Attempting to explore more relevant concerns, the courts tried to address the question of the claimant’s scars, and precisely what they indicated, but here they were thwarted not only by the loss of most of the original documentation during the Second World War but also by Anderson herself. She absolutely refused repeated judicial requests to submit to new physical examinations by independent experts, something that might have clarified the nature of her injuries, and a position that drove her supporters to despair. “Your refusals to undergo such an examination,” Gleb Botkin wrote to her in November 1963, “however justified, give the court a pretext for refusing to rule in your favor and allow your enemies to declare that you are afraid of such examinations.”
35
Ten months later he tried again, saying that “however irksome, it is but a minor unpleasantness. I beg, nay, beseech you, therefore, to agree to that examination.”
36
But she was unbending, and the courts were forced to rely on expert analysis of the remaining medical reports.

The catalog of Anderson’s injuries had been argued and used to bolster her claim for more than forty years when the Oberlandesgericht Court took up the issue. There was the damage to her skull, the alleged depression behind her ear that Rathlef-Keilmann had insisted was “due to a glancing bullet wound.”
37
But no medical documentation supported anything other than a single, minor scar above the ear, one that no doctor ever attributed to a bullet. There was a small scar—so minor no doctor bothered to mention it—on Anderson’s forehead, the result, the claimant said, of a childhood fall and the reason why Anastasia had worn her hair in bangs.
38
Anderson said a small white scar on her right shoulder blade had come when a mole was cauterized so that she could wear a Russian court gown.
39
Journalist Bella Cohen insisted that Alexandra Gilliard confirmed that Anastasia bore such a scar, but this was not true; Rathlef-Keilmann quoted the former nurse as saying that she “could not remember” any such mark.
40
Instead, Rathlef-Keilmann wrote that former officer Nicholas Sablin recalled the scar, then confusingly provided no evidence to support this.
41
The Oberlandesgericht Court found no confirmation that Anastasia had any such scars.

Then there was the scar on Anderson’s middle left finger, another childhood accident, she said, when a servant had shut a carriage door too quickly.
42
Was this true? Rathlef-Keilmann had asked Alexandra Gilliard. The former nurse said it sounded familiar, but she could not recall which of the grand duchesses had suffered such an injury, although Cohen once again insisted—contrary to Rathlef-Keilmann—that the former nurse had confirmed it all.
43
The judges examining Anderson’s case heard from several émigrés who related second- and-thirdhand tales of such an accident.
44
But Olga Alexandrovna rejected this. In 1925 she had written to Princess Irene of Prussia, “It was Marie who had pinched her finger, and some one who thought it was Anastasia must have told her that.”
45
This was later confirmed by former imperial page F. van der Hoeven, who placed the incident about 1909; in her memoirs, Olga essentially repeated this, adding only that it had occurred aboard the imperial train.
46

And the scar on Anderson’s right foot, the transpiercing wound: this, her supporters held, matched exactly the triangular (or star—both were insisted upon) shape of the bayonet blade used by Bolshevik soldiers during Russia’s Civil War.
47
It was an important piece of circumstantial evidence in her favor; proof, as Peter Kurth wrote, that she “had been stabbed in Russia.”
48
No doctor who examined the claimant, though, ever seems to have described this wound as bearing a particularly recognizable and distinct shape; Faith Lavington, who saw it at Seeon, called it a “round mark right through the foot.”
49

Arguments over the state of the claimant’s teeth were equally vague and contradictory. Serge Kostritsky, one of the former dentists to the imperial family, survived the Revolution and lived in exile in Paris. He never personally examined the claimant’s teeth, as Rathlef-Keilmann admitted, because her supporters and the doctors treating her believed that the damage she had suffered to her jaws would have made any comparison impossible.
50
But the duke of Leuchtenberg had plaster casts made of Anderson’s jaws and teeth and dispatched them to the dentist, whose only reply was a dismissive, “As if I would have left the teeth in such a condition!”
51
This avoided the issue, for the claimant was missing sixteen of her teeth and her jaws had been fractured, but Kostritsky declared, “These two plaster casts, in the placement of the teeth and in the shape of the jaws, bear no resemblance whatever to the placement of the teeth or the shape of the jaws of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna.” He also found something interesting: Hutchinson’s incisors, a peculiar development of the teeth indicating that the claimant had been born with congenital syphilis, inherited from one or both of her parents.
52
Kostritsky relied, as he admitted, on memory in making this assessment, for he had left all of his records in Russia, but still he seemed convinced.
53
He told Victoria, marchioness of Milford Haven, that “the build of the jaw and the teeth, such as remained, were radically different” from those of Anastasia.
54
The judges hearing Anderson’s appeal appointed a specialist, Dr. Volker Krüger, to analyze all of the dental evidence; after reviewing the plaster casts and the reports, Krüger stated that it was impossible to determine when and how her teeth had been damaged.
55

And this was the problem with all of Anderson’s scars: too much time had passed, and too many medical records and X-rays had been lost, for any modern review to conclusively establish how she had been wounded. The best that could be done was sort through the decades of often erroneous claims about her injuries—and the nature of her injuries—and determine which scars she actually bore. Their meaning, though—as with so much of Anderson’s case—was subject to interpretation.

Lacking the opportunity to compare Anderson’s fingerprints against those of Anastasia, the courts turned to photographic comparisons and to handwriting analyses. Pierre Gilliard had arranged the earliest photographic studies between the claimant and Anastasia, asking Professor Marc Bischoff, director of the Criminal Sciences Department at the University of Lausanne, to undertake three different analyses in 1927. Bischoff, who two years later founded the International Academy of Criminology in Lausanne with forensic science pioneer Edmond Locard, selected three photographs of Anastasia, one taken at Tsarskoye Selo in 1914, one taken in 1917 after the Revolution and showing the four grand duchesses and Tsesarevich Alexei after their heads had been shaved following measles, and one taken in 1918 at Tobolsk, and three photographs of the claimant, taken in 1920, 1921, and 1922. Bischoff admitted that the photographs did not depict “identical representations” and did not repeat the same angles and lighting conditions, but cavalierly suggested that these differences “posed no obstacle” to accurate comparisons. He compared the profiles, the shape of the right ears, and the facial features and their relationship to one another and found significant differences in the widths of the foreheads; in the shape of the eyes, eyebrows, noses, mouths, and chins; and in the contours of the ears. “It is impossible,” Bischoff declared, “that Mrs. Tchaikovsky could be Grand Duchess Anastasia.”
56

Comparisons for the civil trial in Hamburg of the profiles of Anastasia at Tobolsk (left), winter 1918, and Anna Anderson in the 1920s in Berlin.

Bischoff undertook two further photographic comparisons, using additional images. The first was another analysis of the ears, which he again deemed negative, while the second appraised any physical similarities between the claimant and Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, and Marie Nikolaievna, to preclude the unlikely possibility that Anderson was not Anastasia but rather one of her sisters. This, too, was described as completely negative in outcome.
57
In her book, Rathlef-Keilmann contended that Gilliard had purposely misidentified Anastasia in the 1917 photograph depicting her with a shaven head; after showing the image to Prince Felix Yusupov, Maria von Hesse, Gleb Botkin, and, though an intermediary, Olga Alexandrovna, all four insisted that the figure Gilliard called Anastasia had actually been Olga Nikolaievna. She described this as “monstrous,” contending that “in order to prove the lack of resemblance between the invalid and the real Grand Duchess Anastasia,” Gilliard had lied.
58
When this accusation was published, Maria von Hesse flatly contradicted Rathlef-Keilmann, calling the assertion that she had refuted Gilliard’s identification “pure invention” on Rathlef-Keilmann’s part.
59
In fact, and despite what Rathlef-Keilmann insisted, Gilliard had correctly identified Anastasia in the photograph.
60