In February 1920 a young woman was pulled from the Landwehr Canal in Berlin after a suicide attempt. She carried no papers and would not give her name. She was committed to an asylum, where after eighteen months another patient decided she resembled one of the Tsar's daughters.
The Romanovs had been shot in Yekaterinburg in July 1918, but the bodies had not been found, and rumors that one or more had survived circulated for decades. The woman eventually accepted the identification of Anastasia, and spent the following sixty years as the world's most famous claimant.
She was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker from Pomerania who had disappeared shortly before the canal incident. A private investigation reached that conclusion as early as 1927, and her own family were shown her and identified her, though one brother later equivocated.
None of that settled anything, and the reasons are the point of this chapter.
Her supporters — including several Romanov relatives, émigré aristocrats and a large public — were not persuaded by evidence and were not dissuaded by it either. Anderson's inability to speak Russian, which would seem decisive for a Russian grand duchess, was explained as a trauma response: she had been so traumatized by the murder of her family that the language was blocked. Her fragmentary and inconsistent memories were explained the same way. Her refusal to submit to certain examinations was explained by her frailty.
Every gap became corroboration. A story that explains its own missing evidence is unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable stories do not lose arguments.
Festinger, Riecken and Schachter's study of a millenarian group whose prophecy failed found that disconfirmation, under the right social conditions, increases conviction rather than reducing it — belief perseverance driven by the cost of the public commitment already made. Anderson's supporters had testified in court, written books, staked reputations and family relationships. The cost of being wrong rose every year, and with it the resistance to being wrong.
There was also a collective motive. Émigré communities who had lost a country needed a surviving Romanov, and a claimant supplied a continuity that the alternative did not.
German courts heard the case, on and off, from 1938 to 1970 — one of the longest-running civil actions in German history — and ended without deciding, ruling the evidence insufficient either way.
She died in Virginia in 1984. In 1994, DNA from a preserved tissue sample was compared with a blood sample from Prince Philip, a Romanov relative through the maternal line, and did not match; it did match a Schanzkowski relative. The Romanov remains, found in 1991 and 2007, have all been identified and account for the entire family.
Some believers remain.