Anna Anderson - Assessment

Assessment

Though in July 1918 communists had killed the entire imperial Romanov family, including 17-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia, for years afterwards communist disinformation fed rumors that members of the Tsar's family had survived. The conflicting rumors about the fate of the family allowed impostors to make spurious claims that they were a surviving Romanov.

Most impostors were dismissed; however, Anna Anderson's claim persisted. Books and pamphlets supporting her claims included Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann's book Anastasia, ein Frauenschicksal als Spiegel der Weltkatastrophe (Anastasia, A Woman's Fate as a Mirror of the World Catastrophe), which was published in Germany and Switzerland in 1928, though it was serialized by the tabloid newspaper Berliner Nachtausgabe in 1927. It was countered by works such as La Fausse Anastasie (The False Anastasia) by Pierre Gilliard and Constantin Savitch, published by Payot of Paris in 1929. Conflicting testimonies and physical evidence, such as comparisons of facial characteristics, which alternately supported and contradicted Anderson's claim, were used to either bolster or counter the belief that she was Anastasia. In the absence of any direct documentary proof or solid physical evidence, the question of whether Anderson was Anastasia was for many a matter of personal belief. As Anderson herself said in her own idiomatic English, "You either believe it or you don't believe it. It doesn't matter. In no anyway whatsoever." The German courts were unable to decide her claim one way or another, and eventually, after 40 years of deliberation, ruled that her claim was "neither established nor refuted". Dr. Günter von Berenberg-Gossler, attorney for Anderson's opponents in the later years of the legal case, said that during the German trials "the press were always more interested in reporting her side of the story than the opposing bench's less glamorous perspective; editors often pulled journalists after reporting testimony delivered by her side and ignored the rebuttal, resulting in the public seldom getting a complete picture."

In 1957, a version of Anderson's story, pieced together by her supporters and interspersed with commentary by Roland Krug von Nidda, was published in Germany under the title Ich, Anastasia, Erzähle (I, Anastasia, an autobiography). The book included the "fantastic tale" that Anastasia escaped Russia on a farm cart with a man called Alexander Tschaikovsky, whom she married and had a child by, before he was shot dead in a Bucharest street and the child, Alexei, disappeared into an orphanage. Even Anderson's supporters admitted that the details of the supposed escape "might seem bold inventions even for a dramatist", while her detractors considered "this barely credible story as a piece of far-fetched romance". Other works based on the premise that Anderson was Anastasia, written before the DNA tests, include biographies by Peter Kurth and James Blair Lovell. More recent biographies by John Klier, Robert Massie and Greg King that describe her as an impostor were written after the DNA tests proved she was not Anastasia.

Assessments vary as to whether she was a deliberate fraud, a young woman traumatized into adopting a new identity, or used by her supporters for their own ends. Pierre Gilliard denounced Anderson as "a cunning psychopath". Writer Michael Thornton thought, "Somewhere along the way she lost and rejected Schanzkowska. She lost that person totally and accepted completely she was this new person. I think it happened by accident and she was swept along on a wave of euphoria." Lord Mountbatten, a first cousin of the Romanov children, thought her supporters "simply get rich on the royalties of further books, magazine articles, plays etc." Prince Michael Romanov, a grandson of Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia, stated the Romanov family always knew Anderson was a fraud, and that the family looked upon her and "the three-ringed circus which danced around her, creating books and movies, as a vulgar insult to the memory of the Imperial Family."