Unsolved mysteries · People & lives

A Polish factory worker who outlasted everyone calling her a liar

In February 1920 a young woman pulled from a Berlin canal refused to give her name and ended up in an asylum, where another patient decided she looked like one of the murdered Tsar's daughters. Within a couple of years she was going by Anna Tschaikovsky and claiming, or allowing others to claim for her, that she was Anastasia, the youngest Romanov grand duchess, who had supposedly survived her family's 1918 execution. She spent years shuttling between the homes of sympathetic aristocrats and émigrés, some of whom were utterly convinced and others who took one look and declared her an obvious fraud. A private investigator hired by the Tsarina's brother identified her as Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker who had vanished from her lodgings after a head injury and breakdown, but the woman never accepted that identity and a Schanzkowski sibling's confused testimony only muddied things further.

Her claim crossed the Atlantic in 1928 with help from supporters who hoped to recover a nonexistent Romanov fortune, and for a while she was a minor celebrity in New York society before a spell of erratic, destructive behavior landed her in a sanatorium and then back in Germany. There she spent decades as a recluse in a decaying cottage, the subject of a lawsuit over the Tsar's estate that dragged on for so long it became the longest-running case in German legal history, ending in 1970 without resolving anything. In 1968 she moved to the United States for good and married a Virginia history professor, Jack Manahan, in what was essentially a marriage of convenience; the two became notorious local eccentrics, living amid clutter and animals until her health failed and she died in 1984, after which her ashes were returned to the German castle where she had once lived.

The question of who she really was persisted for decades as a matter of belief rather than proof, fed by conflicting eyewitness testimony, physical resemblance arguments, and a steady stream of books and films that kept her legend alive, including a Hollywood film and later an animated musical. It was only after the Soviet collapse allowed the Romanov remains to be found and DNA-tested that the matter was settled: genetic material from her preserved medical tissue and hair matched a relative of the Schanzkowski family and not the Romanovs or their kin, confirming she was indeed Franziska Schanzkowska. Even so, opinions remain divided over whether she was a calculated impostor, a delusional woman who truly believed her own story, or someone shaped and used by the hopes of her supporters. Her case left behind a long trail of fiction, legal history, and unresolved psychological speculation that still outlives the DNA verdict itself.

Her mitochondrial DNA matched a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska — the Polish factory worker she had been accused of being 60 years earlier.

Read the whole of Anna Anderson on Wikipedia

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