The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (46 page)

Maurice Philip Remy continued through the winter and spring of 1995 to look for a way to make his own contribution to resolving Anna Anderson’s identity. Ironically, after two and a half years of intensive effort, he had achieved little. He never obtained access to the Charlottesville tissue. He did not possess any of the Chapel Hill hair. His only source of what he believed was Anna Anderson DNA was the
1951 blood slide from which Charles Ginther at Berkeley was unable to extract DNA. Remy’s scientist, Dr. Bernd Herrmann of Göttingen University, did find nuclear DNA on the slide. Comparing short tandem repeats taken from this slide to the published STRs of Nicholas and Alexandra, Herrmann declared that Anna Anderson could not have been Anastasia. Unfortunately for Remy, Peter Gill declared at the October 5 London press conference that the DNA from Remy’s slide and the DNA from the Charlottesville tissue did not match. No one, therefore, knew who the donor of Remy’s blood slide had been. In addition, Gill has quietly expressed doubt about Dr. Herrmann’s technique. An attempt to get DNA from a slide which is highly vulnerable to contamination is almost certain to go wrong, Gill believes; a scientist is more likely to get DNA from his own breath or his own saliva. Finally, Dr. Gill said that, until the name came up in connection with Remy’s claim of triumph in the
Sunday Times
, he had never heard of Dr. Herrmann.
^*

Nevertheless, in May 1995, Remy was still urging his scientists to try to extract more DNA from the blood slide and send it to Ginther for comparison with his Hessian profiles. If Ginther were to obtain a match (indicating that the donor was related to Empress Alexandra), this would indeed be news, and all previous test results would have to be reevaluated. The irony is that this result would delight Remy’s erstwhile antagonists, the Schweitzers, and dismay his former allies, the Hessians and Prince Scherbatov.

A new result would not, at this stage, have greatly concerned Dr. Willi Korte, who, no longer employed by Remy, had returned to tracking stolen art. The relationship between Remy and Korte was distant. Korte, a professional investigator, was not pleased that Remy had claimed credit for most of the original thinking in the case. (Korte told the
Abendzeitung
of Munich that the idea of identifying Anna Anderson by tracking down samples of remaining tissue or blood—which Remy had claimed was his—had come to him in August
1992 as he was sitting in the lobby of Moscow’s Slavanskaya Hotel.) “To make a long story short,” Korte said, “I set this whole thing up. But I don’t consider it one of my better cases. It did fall apart. I had too many amateurs running around. At the end, certain people sort of lost their nerve. They were all over the place, trying to save their skins.”

Who was Franziska Schanzkowska, the woman who for over sixty years had claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia? She was born in 1896 in the Prussian province of Posen, adjacent to the border with Poland, which was then a part of the Russian Empire. Two hundred years before, her family had belonged to the lesser Polish nobility, but by the end of the nineteenth century, the family were farmworkers. Franziska’s father, an impoverished alcoholic, died when his children were young. In the village where she grew up, Franziska always was different and solitary. She did not make friends, and she tried especially to distance herself from her sisters by assuming what they considered an affected, upper-class manner. At harvesttime, when the entire village was out in the fields bringing in hay, Franziska would be found lying in a cart reading books on history.

“My Auntie Franziska was the cleverest of the four children,” said Waltraud Schanzkowska, a resident of Hamburg. “She didn’t want to be buried in a little one-horse town. She wanted to come out into the world, to become an actress—something special.” In 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Franziska, at age eighteen, left the Polish provinces for Berlin. She worked as a waitress, met a young man, and became engaged. Before she could marry, her fiancé was called up for military service. Franziska began working in a munitions factory. In 1916, the young man was killed on the western front. Soon afterward, Franziska let a grenade slip from her hands on the assembly line. It exploded nearby, inflicting splinter wounds on her head and other parts of her body and eviscerating a foreman, who died before her eyes. She was sent to a sanatorium, where her physical injuries healed but the shock remained. Franziska was declared “not cured, but not dangerous,” and discharged. She was taken in, almost
as a charity case, by Frau Wingender, who gave her a room of her own. Incapable of working long periods, Franziska was in and out of sanatoria; in between, she remained bedridden at the Wingenders’ apartment, complaining of headaches, swallowing pills, and reading history books from the local library. In February 1920, her favorite brother, Felix, received a last message from her. On February 17, 1920, she disappeared.

According to Peter Gill, DNA is infallible, and therefore we know that Fräulein Unbekannt, Anna Tschaikovsky, Anna Anderson, and Anastasia Manahan all evolved from Franziska Schanzkowska. Her Polish family identity explains the central flaw in her claim: that is, her ability to understand Russian but not to speak it as a native. Nevertheless, it was an astonishing and brilliant performance. Almost certainly, she did not start out as an impostor. She was in Dalldorf asylum for two years; she had a strong resemblance to one of the tsar’s daughters; people around her wanted to believe. Then she went out and lived among the emigres. Here was an interesting new life. People paid attention to her; some bowed and curtsied and called her Your Imperial Highness. In time, her mind absorbed this alternative identity and she was transformed.

After Peter Gill’s press conference, some of Anna Anderson’s supporters said that perhaps she was not the daughter of the tsar but she could not possibly have been a Polish peasant. Yet many famous professional actresses, of equally humble origins, have convinced audiences playing the roles of majestic grandes dames. A great lady is not necessarily a woman of ancient pedigree and expensive schooling; she can be someone accustomed to a certain milieu for a long time and confident of her position. Anna Anderson had sixty-three years to learn the part.

She had a strong and emphatic personality, and she was sure of the role she had found for herself. Even her enemy Dr. Gunther von Berenberg-Gossler, who opposed her claim for years in the German courts, paid tribute to that “exceptional” quality and to her “life achievement.” “Be prepared,” he said to a young man about to meet
her for the first time. “She will win you over. She has the greatest suggestive power of any person I have ever met.” In fact, after the early years, she herself never attempted to persuade people of her identity. Instead, it was others who adopted her cause, took her claim to court, and demanded of the world that she be recognized.

Now, more than a decade after her death, the mystery of her identity has been solved. The woman pulled from a Berlin canal was not Grand Duchess Anastasia; she was an impostor with astonishing physical similarities to the young woman who died in an Ekaterinburg cellar in 1918. Nevertheless, her life
was
exceptional. If, once upon a time, she was a Polish factory worker, she became—in her own mind and the minds of her supporters—a princess. Her performance, still so vivid that some cannot put it aside, lent color to the twentieth century. Many real grand dukes and grand duchesses survived the revolution and then lived and died in relative obscurity. Against this backdrop, only one woman will be remembered: Anna Anderson.

CHAPTER 19
 
 THE ROMANOV EMIGRES

T
he slaughter of the Romanovs neither began nor ended with the tsar’s immediate family. The first Romanov to die after Lenin’s seizure of power was sixty-eight-year-old Grand Duke Nicholas Constantinovich, who, as a result of banishment to Central Asia by Tsar Alexander II, had lived most of his life in Tashkent. Here he was killed by the Bolsheviks in unknown circumstances in February 1918. The second Romanov murdered was Nicholas II’s younger brother forty-year-old Grand Duke Michael. Arrested at Gatchina, near Petrograd, Michael and his English secretary, Brian Johnson, were interned in a hotel in Perm in the Urals. For six months Michael was treated liberally, granted “all the rights of a citizen of the republic,” and allowed to stroll in the town and go to church. Then, on the night of July 13, 1918—three days before the murders in Ekaterinburg—three men burst into Michael’s hotel room, seized him and his secretary, ordered them into two small carriages, and drove them into the countryside. Turning off the road into the forest, they stopped and offered the grand duke a cigarette. As he smoked, one of the captors
pulled out a revolver and shot Johnson in the temple. Michael, arms outstretched, ran toward his secretary and friend, as if to protect him. Three bullets were fired into Michael. The bodies were covered with twigs to be buried later. Andrew Markov, chief of the murderers, then went to Moscow, where, at Yakov Sverdlov’s suggestion, he was taken to tell his story to Lenin.

Less than twenty-four hours after the Imperial family was murdered in Ekaterinburg, six more Romanovs were killed 120 miles away, at Alapayevsk. They included Grand Duchess Elizabeth, age fifty-four, sister of Empress Alexandra; Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, forty-nine; three sons of Grand Duke Constantine: Prince John, thirty-two, Prince Constantine, twenty-seven, and Prince Igor, twenty-four; and Prince Vladimir Paley, twenty-one, the son by a morganatic marriage of Nicholas II’s uncle Grand Duke Paul.