The Resurrection of the Romanovs (49 page)

And what did his mother tell him to say? No evidence suggests that Franziska’s family knew of her claim, or even that she was alive, before Martin Knopf appeared in Hygendorf. Saying that he believed he had found the missing Franziska, Knopf first asked Marianna and her daughters to simply identify photographs of the claimant; only when they had done so did he reveal that Franziska claimed to be Anastasia.
34
Unsophisticated and unaware, having already identified the claimant as her daughter, Marianna now for the first time learned of her charade. After the story broke in the
Berliner Nachtausgabe
, Hygendorf was overrun by inquisitive journalists, and the entire village was caught up in Franziska’s escapades: by the second week of April, reporters had descended on the little hamlet and, as a neighbor recalled, “the driveway of the Schanzkowsky house was filled with autos.” Journalists peered in windows, stopped people on the street to ask about Franziska, and knocked on Marianna’s door day and night.
35

One of the visitors was Fritz Schuricht, a private detective hired by Rathlef-Keilmann to investigate the
Nachtausgabe
story. He found Marianna “much vexed and agitated over the case,” and at first she refused to speak to him, saying that she “wanted nothing to do with it at all.” Finally, however, she relented. When shown photographs of the claimant, Marianna now insisted she wasn’t her daughter, and she refused to let Schuricht speak to Gertrude, Maria Juliana, or anyone else. Midway through the interview, a car pulled up outside the farmhouse, and Marianna’s second husband stormed in; after the couple exchanged a few words in Polish, he grabbed a pitchfork and waved it at Schuricht. “I came to the conclusion,” Schuricht noted with ironic understatement, “that there was no point in staying to ask any more questions, and Frau Schanzkowska [sic] assured me that it was best if I left. It was clear that the man was very annoyed with the whole business.”
36

What had changed? What caused this abrupt and unconvincing reversal? Franziska had become famous; supporters had paid her medical expenses and provided for her in the belief that she was a grand duchess; she had lived with aristocrats, even a Berlin police inspector. Would her family now be held responsible, not just for her care but also for any legal action, for any charge of financial fraud? Lies had been told, lies by Franziska that could result in legal action; now Marianna added to the lie, scared to admit that Germany’s most famous living enigma was her daughter. “It was from this point forward,” remembered one of Franziska’s friends in Hygendorf, that Marianna “began to tell everyone that her daughter was dead.”
37

This, presumably, was what Marianna told Felix to say, to deny that the claimant was his sister, to insist that she was most likely dead. When, on the afternoon of May 9, 1927, Rathlef-Keilmann and her lawyer Wilhelm Voller met his train, Felix said, “I don’t think that my sister could still be alive, because Franziska was very fond of me, and I am sure that she would have written.”
38
The trio drove to the village of Wasserburg-am-Inn, some twenty miles northwest of Seeon, where a meeting had been arranged in the beer garden of the Bridge Brewery; soon Franziska, accompanied by the duke of Leuchtenberg, his son Dimitri and daughter-in-law Catherine, and his two daughters Nathalia and Tamara, arrived in several cars.
39
As the claimant entered the beer garden, Voller turned to Felix Schanzkowsky, asking, “Who is this lady?”

“That’s my sister, that’s Franziska,” he replied without hesitation.
40

Seeing her brother, recalled the duke’s two daughters, Franziska became “very agitated, and her jaw trembled through the whole of the meeting.” Both Nathalia and Tamara thought that “the likeness” between the pair “was unmistakable, the same height, coloring, features, and particularly the mouth.”
41

“Well, go and speak to your brother!”
42
It was the duke of Leuchtenberg who broke the unnerving silence. The notoriously obstinate claimant meekly obeyed without any protest, her action confirming her brother’s identification. The pair, remembered Dimitri Leuchtenberg, spoke “beyond our earshot” for some minutes, something confirmed by his wife, Catherine, though what was said is not known.
43

After some thirty minutes, a silent Franziska returned to Seeon; the duke of Leuchtenberg, as willfully obtuse as ever, admitted only that Felix thought the claimant “might be his sister.”
44
And Felix? “My sister’s hair was different, my sister’s figure was different, my sister’s hands were different, but that’s my sister,” he said as she left the beer garden.
45
He sat with Rathlef-Keilmann and Voller, looking at an affidavit, drawn up in advance, in which he admitted that the claimant was Franziska. Suddenly, inexplicably, he changed his mind: the claimant wasn’t his sister after all.
46
He did, though, sign a second affidavit, stating that while there was “a great resemblance” between the two, the claimant’s “speech and manner of speaking” were different from those of his sister. The claimant, ran the affidavit composed by Voller and Rathlef-Keilmann and signed by Felix, “gave no sign that she knew who I was. From the look on her face, it was plain that she did not know me at all.” Instead, she had treated him “as nothing more than an unknown person who had come to see her.”
47

It was all at odds—extraordinarily so—with what had just taken place, what the seven witnesses had just seen. Rathlef-Keilmann, of course, was quite willing to suspend disbelief and dismiss contrary evidence, but why had Felix Schanzkowsky made such a clumsy and unconvincing reversal? Perhaps he had arrived at Wasserburg prepared to follow his mother’s directive, only to falter when he came face-to-face with his sister. If so, he must surely have realized that his immediate recognition could lead to disaster, for in lying to Schuricht, Marianna had set in motion a web of deceit that had to be maintained. If Felix clung to his immediate recognition, he may have feared that he exposed his mother to prosecution, his family, assurances to the contrary, to legal action and financial turmoil. To save his mother, he had to deny his sister, and this was the likely message he conveyed to Franziska when they spoke in the beer garden. In 1920, Franziska had insisted that her family was dead; now, in the spring of 1927, Marianna began telling people that Franziska was dead. After years of antipathy and uneasy relations, mother and daughter finally seem to have come to agreement: neither wanted anything to do with the other ever again.

For Franziska’s supporters, though, Felix’s ultimate rejection was enough; they ignored his immediate recognition in favor of his later repudiation. Soon the duke of Leuchtenberg was at it again, erroneously insisting that “throughout the confrontation” the claimant and her brother “each showed clearly that there was no previous relationship between them.”
48
Gleb Botkin’s dismissal of the entire episode bore an equally tenuous relationship to the truth. He declared that there was “not the slightest resemblance” between the photograph of Franziska and the claimant, and asserted that the entire story “was concocted by Knopf and Gilliard” based on the statements of Doris Wingender, whom he maliciously and erroneously called a prostitute.
49
Botkin reserved most of his scorn for Gilliard, writing that the former tutor had sold “his reputation as a loyal and honest man” to “our chief enemy, the Grand Duke of Hesse,” to deny the claimant her rightful name.
50

And then there was Rathlef-Keilmann, who refused to accept any of what she termed “the Schanzkowsky Myth.”
51
She advanced a number of increasingly bizarre theories to explain it all away: the real Franziska, she first insisted, had fallen victim to a criminal gang in Berlin and could not, therefore, possibly be the claimant, a position she soon had to retract when challenged on the evidence.
52
Next, she contended that Doris Wingender was simply wrong, that she had once visited the same apartment building where Clara Peuthert lived, there encountered the claimant, “who must have had a certain similarity” to Franziska, and mistaken the two women—an ingenious theory but one unsupported by the evidence.
53
And Franziska? Rathlef-Keilmann now declared that she had fallen victim to Berlin serial killer and cannibal Georg Grossmann, a loathsome man who slaughtered upward of fifty young women in the years after the First World War; the bits of flesh he hadn’t consumed were sold to unsuspecting butcher shops and ended up in the stomachs of a desperate city. Before he committed suicide in 1921, police found Grossmann’s diary, a registry of barbaric horrors that included, among his victims, the name “Saznovski,” which Rathlef-Keilmann suggested was the phonetic rendering of Schanzkowsky.
54
The Berlin police, however, rejected this would-be identification.
55

Rathlef-Keilmann, though, wasn’t about to let anything like investigations by the Berlin police change her determined mind, and in the autumn of 1927 she once again took her case to the press, publishing a series of articles in the
Tägliche Rundschau
. She openly attacked the
Berliner Nachtausgabe
and its investigation, asserting that the “Schanzkowsky legend” had been a plot against the claimant, “this poor, helpless creature, who is tormented and victimized at every turn,” she declared. Doris Wingender had been paid for her story and she—well, Rathlef-Keilmann’s conspiratorially minded readers could fill in the blanks. No one, Rathlef-Keilmann insisted—not a single member of Franziska’s family, nor anyone else who had known her in Hygendorf or in Berlin—had recognized the claimant as the missing factory worker.
56

And, as with so much of the evidence in the case, Rathlef-Keilmann was wrong, this time willfully wrong. By the summer of 1927, eleven people had identified the claimant as Franziska: Otto Meyer, her former teacher in Hygendorf; his son Richard; her childhood friend Martha Schrock; Anna Wingender and her three daughters Doris, Luise, and Kathe Wypyrczyk; her sisters Gertrude and Maria Juliana; and her mother, Marianna, and her brother Felix, even if the last two had abruptly and unconvincingly reversed themselves.
57

But if Rathlef-Keilmann was willing to ignore this accumulated evidence, officials were not. Martin Knopf turned in his investigative reports, witness statements, and photographic evidence to Count von Hardenberg, who in turn presented the Darmstadt police with an edited version of the dossier, along with a letter stating that the claimant’s identity as Franziska Schanzkowska had been definitively established. This the Darmstadt police passed on to the Berlin police, urging that they officially rule on the issue. After a short investigation, the Berlin police found that the claimant was Franziska and closed their files on her case.
58

The game was over. Except that it wasn’t, for fate once again came to Franziska’s rescue. Amazingly, people still wanted to believe that she was Anastasia, that the story Rathlef-Keilmann told was true. Amazingly, the reality of the “unmasking” faded in the face of desire, ignored, distorted, and dismissed by her supporters until it was reduced to an absurdity, a mere footnote to her story.

Felix Schanzkowsky slunk away, back into the shadows, but he, too, had now become part of the story: as soon as he reversed himself and signed a statement denying his earlier recognition of the claimant as his sister, he, too, became enmeshed in his mother’s conspiracy to subvert the truth. Each declaration buried the family deeper within a legal nightmare dominated by fear of collusion and prosecution. It was even worse, because privately he continually admitted he’d lied. He told Gertrude that he’d gone to meet Franziska in a place “where queens walked in the park,” presumably a reference to Seeon; he’d recognized her, but denied it in his statement.
59
He confessed the same thing to his wife, Emma Mueller; to their daughter Waltraut; and to his niece, adding that “for the sake of the family” he’d changed his initial identification.
60

It all died away, at least for a time, and a public fascinated by the myth of a surviving Anastasia quickly forgot “the Schanzkowsky legend.” Not so officialdom, and not so the most unlikely player ever to enter the tangled tale: Adolf Hitler, whose Third Reich now wanted the issue resolved.
61
In 1937, a representative from the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin called on officials in Hannover, where Franziska then lived, and demanded a new confrontation with the Schanzkowsky family. The initiative was at least partially arranged by a former Russian general named Vassili Biskupsky, who had replaced Serge Botkin as head of the Russian Émigré Office in Berlin; Biskupsky, in turn, was closely allied to Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, son and heir of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich.
62

And so, on order from the Reichschancellery, Nazi officials tracked down Franziska’s family. Marianna Czenstkowski Knopf had died of pneumonia on December 20, 1932, in Hygendorf at age sixty-six.
63
Valerian still worked the farm in Hygendorf; Gertrude had married a coachman named August Ellerik and lived with him and their daughter Margarete on the outskirts of the village, near her sister Maria Juliana and her husband, Florian Zakorski; only Felix had fled the area to work in Ammendorf in the Ruhr Valley as a miner.
64
All were shown photographs of the claimant: Gertrude readily identified her as Franziska, Felix thought she looked “too different,” and both Valerian and Maria Juliana insisted that they’d scarcely known Franziska when she had lived with them, and that too much time had passed for them to offer a reliable opinion.
65