Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson
by Peter Kurth
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peter KurthEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1985-06-30
ISBN: 0316507172
Number of pages: 456
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson
Book Review: DNA results = a lot of hooey
Summary: 5 Stars
Somebody PLEASE tell me how a woman the same age, height, hair color, unusual eye color, scars, moles, deformation of the feet, skin turning into red blotches when nervous, same memories, knowledge, handwriting, ears, love of animals, feet position when standing, posture, love of photography cannot be the same person.
Anna Anderson had a congenital foot deformity just like Anastasia. She had a cauterized mole on a shoulder-blade just like Anastasia. She had a scar on the middle finger of her left hand from a carriage door being shut on it as a child just like Anastasia. She had a small, faint scar on her forehead from a fall as a child just like Anastasia. Three fingers of one of her hands were the same length just like Anastasia and Empress Alexandra.
She knew her cousin from voice alone when she was staying at Oyster Bay and did not know he was coming.
NOBODY REMEMBERS THAT FRANKZISKA AND ANASTASIA WERE BOTH ACCOUNTED FOR AT THE SAME TIME.
Explain that one!
Franziska's feet were much larger than Anna's. Franziska's brother said so. He said Franziska had NO deformities of the feet. He could NOT recall his sister's eye color? Anna Anderson/Anastasia had the same unusual deep blue eye color that the Tsar had. It is a blue that once you see it, you don't forget it.
So funny how once Anna/Anastasia told Aunt Olga about the Tsar's money in the bank of England, Olga renounced her. Up until that point she wrote to Anna/Anastasia that she would never abandon her.
When Grand Duchess Olga, Anastasia's aunt and sister of Nicholas II, came to meet Anna Anderson, she appeared to recognize her as her niece Anastasia and wrote many endearing letters to her. She asked Anna if she knew of any bank accounts in the West. Anna told her that her father had put money on deposit in England for his four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia. This money had been placed in a camouflaged account. With this information, Ambassador Zahle made inquires at the bank and was told that the money was indeed there. The bank declined to state the amount. One must ask how an insane Polish factory worker could know about a secret bank account that Grand Duchess Olga, the Emperor's sister, did not even know about? Soon after this Aunt Olga's visits and letters stopped.
Anybody think the British Royal family wouldn't go so far as to tamper with the DNA samples? The tissue went missing for a while before it went to the test. Hmmmmmmmm.
The tissue sample for the DNA testing was preserved in a paraffin block in Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville. No unusual security measures were instituted when its existence became known. For one period of approximately three months, it could not be located when a researcher made inquiries about it. Dr. Peter Gill who tested the sample referred to it as the "putative" tissue sample of Anna Anderson. Putative means "commonly believed or assumed to be". Reasonable doubts remain about this sample and its apparent, temporary disappearance from the hospital.
DNA tests conducted by Dr. Peter Gill did not prove that she was Franziska Schanzkowksa. Dr. Gill took pains to call the tissue tested as the "putative Anna Anderson samples". Anna Anderson appeared in Berlin in February 1920. Franziska disappeared in March of 1920. Franziska's brother, Felix Schanzkowski met Anna Anderson on May 9, 1927, and signed an affidavit stating categorically that she was NOT his sister.
Photographs of Anna were not altered to look like the Grand Duchess but the photograph of Franziska was retouched twice and the Judge proclaimed it so in court as did 2 court experts.
Anna Anderson appeared in Berlin on February 17, 1920, when she was pulled from the Landwehr Canal after an apparent suicide attempt. However, Franziska Schanzkowska did not disappear from Berlin until March of that year. Both women were accounted for at the same time.
Anna was in the asylum at the time. How could she have escaped there and been Franziska elsewhere at the same time?
In 1925 Anna Anderson innocently answered a question that she had last seen her uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse in 1916. The grand duke, on hearing this, said "This is a catastrophe" and denounced her as an impostor. His unauthorized trip during wartime would have been considered treason. Interestingly, the Soviet government confirmed the secret trip which he had denied when it published previously secret tsarist archives in two books, Monarkhia pered Krusheniem, 1914-1917 (Moscow, 1927) and Romanovyi germanskie vliyania, 1914-1917 (Moscow, 1929). The former tutor of the Grand Duke's son, Fritz Unruh, came forward to say that the grand Duke had, indeed, made the trip, and that he had helped him prepare for it. How would a demented peasant girl know all of this?
It was at this point that the grand duke went to work to try to find some missing person they could say that Anna Anderson really was. The Franziska Schanzkowska myth was born.
Summary of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson
The most dramatic unsolved mystery of the century.In July 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and their five children were shot by Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.
In February 1920, a woman who many believe was the Grand Duchess Anastasia was rescued from a canal in Berlin.
In July 1992, the body of Anastasia, the youngest grand duchess, was found to be missing from her family's grave.
This is the story of what happened in between.
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