Four years after the execution of Tsar Nicholas II's family, some claimed to be his daughter Anastasia, who later changed her name to Anna Anderson.
Whether Anderson is Anastasia or not seems to have become an unsolvable mystery. In 1989, the Soviet government released several reports left by Yakov Yurovsky, commander of villa Ipachev, who was in charge of the execution, detailing the process of shooting and disposing of the body. The report said the truck carrying the bodies had broken anchor in the Potjachi Forest, so they burned the bodies of Alexei and one of his sisters and buried them separately from the nine other victims. In 1991, the burial ground of the Tsarist family was discovered, and Anglo-American experts extracted DNA from the skeletal remains, four of which matched DNA donated by the Duke of Edinburgh (whose maternal grandmother was Queen Alexandra's sister), while another set of DNA compared to dna from members of the Romanov family proved to be Nicholas II. But the mystery did not disappear, but aroused people's curiosity: there were two remains missing, one was Crown Prince Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia, and the other was his sister. The second burial site described by Yurovsky was also unable to be found after a long search, perhaps to resolve the unsolved case of survivors, and Russian scientists used photo comparison to insist that Anastasia's body had been found, but Grand Duchess Maria was missing. American experts pointed out that according to the development of teeth, sacral bones and bones, it can be said that Anastasia was not buried in the first burial place.
Photograph of Anna in the United States in 1929
Is Anderson really Anastasia? Scientists want to solve the mystery through DNA technology. Anderson's body had been cremated, but a small part of her intestines had been removed in 1979 and kept at Charlottesville Hospital, along with a few strands of hair that could be compared to dna from the remains of the Tsar's family. The results were surprising: Anderson's genes did not match those of the found remains or other relatives of the Romanov family, and she could not have been Grand Duchess Anastasia.
If it wasn't Anastasia, who was she? Since the late 1920s, opponents have believed that her true identity was Franziska Shanzkovska, a female worker at a German factory in West Prussia (now Poland), who disappeared in Berlin before the police found "Anastasia Tchaikovsky" in the canal. The scientists obtained a blood sample from Shanzkowska's nephew, Karl Maughher, compared it with DNA from Anderson's gut and hair, and found that it could be matched. The royal celebrity turned out to be just a country girl.
The Black Forest Cottage in Germany where Anna lived until 1968
However, the identification results still failed to solve the mystery. How did an uneducated peasant woman pass the test of many royal nobles and be recognized as a true Russian grand duke? How to explain that they have the same scars, the same thumb valgus, the same blue eyes, and convincingly clear memories? In a sense, the experience of Franziska Shanzkovska's imposter is as wonderful as the story of Anastasia's miraculous survival: decades of disguise show that she is extraordinarily capable, intelligent, and cunning enough to make her as compelling as a real princess.
Born in 1896 into a declining aristocratic family, Franziska was clever, could speak three Chinese, excelled in her studies, and was not an uneducated peasant, as people say. Her family life was miserable, her father was an alcoholic, and her mother abused her, all of which made her want a better life. Friends in her hometown of Hegendorf remember her pretentious behavior. She moved to Berlin at the age of 17 to work in an arsenal. On August 22, 1916, a grenade she had dropped killed the foreman, causing Franziska to have a nervous breakdown. For the next two years, she moved in and out of the shelter and then worked as an agricultural worker near a Russian prisoner-of-war camp in northern Germany. Here she learned Russian, which she could not speak well but understood. In the autumn of 1918, a soldier attacked Franziska for some reason, wounding her jaw with farm tools and loosening her teeth, leaving scars that Fritzska falsely claimed had been inflicted during the execution in Yekaterinburg.
Anna Anderson was photographed when she was about 82 years old, when she presented herself as Anastasia Manahan and died in 1984 at the age of 87
She then spent 15 months recuperating in an apartment in Berlin with Anna Wengende and her daughter Doris, complaining of headaches and toothaches. Anna recalls: "She always said she wanted to be a big person. Franzisca barely went out, lying in bed every day reading romance novels, and by the third week of February 1920 she was missing. In 1927, the Wingend mother and daughter saw a picture of Franziska in the newspaper, reporting that she was the surviving Anastasia, and they learned what had happened, and then an editor introduced them to Martin Knopf. Knopf was a private investigator hired by Empress Alexandra's brother, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, who soon discovered Franziska's mother, Mary Anna, and her sister Maria Iuliana, who lived in Heigendorf. Both confirmed that the fake princess was a lost daughter, and Franziska's friends from the same village agreed.
When Doris Wengende confronted the fake princess, she immediately recognized her as a tenant of her mother; Franziska's brother Felix also recognized her as his sister, but soon confessed that she had made a mistake for fear of being implicated. Ten years later, the Nazi government again arranged for Franziska to confront her family, and her sister Gati immediately recognized Franziska, but after brief consultations her siblings persuaded Gáti to refuse to sign the statement. Felix used to lie to protect his mother from legal action, and now the family must protect Felix for the same reason.
The Church of the Spilled Blood, built at the site where the Tsar's family was killed
Amazingly, Anderson's supporters believe she is not Franziska, convinced that it is just a story concocted by opponents. Such was the power of desire, and it made the myths she had made up even more believable. Franziska took full advantage of this desire to carry out her plan, toying with those who were deeply addicted to tragic fairy tales. She read a lot, studied royal postcards, learned English, and performed conscientiously as a grand duke for 60 years, lest she reveal her true identity. She once inadvertently said: "Who am I, and who should I pretend to be?" ”
She does have a unique ability to trick people into pretending. Anastasia may have died in 1918, but Franziska survived for her, making her the most famous Russian princess in history.
(Source: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Empire)