Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 9, 1994                   TAG: 9410140019
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: B7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: REBECCA J. FOWLER THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

HOW THIS ANASTASIA WAS FINALLY REVEALED AS FRAUD

After three-quarters of a century of speculation, it was only last Wednesday that the memory of the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II of Russia's ill-fated royal family, was truly put to rest. The woman in the Bavarian grave, who claimed to be the surviving heir to the Romanov throne until her death in Charlottesville, Va., in 1984, has been finally, unequivocally revealed as a fraud.

In a fiercely bitter scientific race, two separate research teams simultaneously unlocked the key to her identity using DNA tracing. A German team, led by television producer Maurice Philip Remy, used a 43-year-old specimen of the blood from the woman, who was known throughout her life as Anna Anderson. A British team, led by forensic scientist Peter Gill, had a minute sample of her intestine that was preserved in paraffin wax.

Their results, presented at a news conference in London last Wednesday, showed Anderson's DNA bore no resemblance to that of the czar and czarina, whose bones were discovered in 1991 with samples of their DNA still intact.

``Perhaps anticipating science, Anderson requested she be cremated ... ,'' said Remy. ``Since the genetic secrets of her body could not be derived from ashes, it seemed as if the mystery would never be solved, but at last we can say that this woman, who was supported by champions throughout her life, was not Anastasia.''

Last month, the Russian government reported that after two years of study, scientists had concluded that Anastasia had indeed died in 1918 - her bones were among those of the royal family identified in 1991.

For the princes, dukes, writers and historians who had made Anderson's claims their most treasured cause, the fairy tale is finally over. But her real life was a story as poignant as ``The Princess and the Pauper.'' Not only has science shown who she was not, for the first time we know who she probably was - most likely the daughter of a poor Polish farming family.

The fantasy started in the bloody wake of the Russian revolution when the Bolsheviks arrived at Yekaterinburg in July 1918 to massacre the Russian royal family. As they faced the seven Romanovs, the royal physician and three servants, the soldiers were ordered to aim straight at their hearts.

Instead, bullets ricocheted across the room, bouncing off the crown jewels sewn into the clothing of the princesses. The bodies disappeared without a trace, and the rumors began.

Two years later, a world away, policemen saved a young woman from a suicide attempt in the freezing waters of the Landwehr canal in Berlin. She was eventually admitted to the Dalldorf mental hospital refusing to reveal her identity to anyone, and the nurses finally christened her Miss Unknown.

But in 1921 while she was still a patient at the mental hospital, according to staff, she saw a magazine with the headline ``Did Anastasia Survive the Massacre?'' And there was a picture of the princess. A nurse later recalled Miss Unknown's response. ``She asked me if I didn't notice something about it,'' said Anna Chemnitz. ``I answered that I didn't. She then said, `Can't you see the similarity between us two?'''

Within months Russian exiles began to stream to the mental asylum to meet the lost Anastasia and brought their own memories of life in the aristocracy.

``With each group of visitors she would glean information on the world in which Anastasia lived to impress the next,'' Remy said.

For the monarchists who had been banished from their homeland, she was a bridge back to the past, and they offered the woman a middle-class home outside the hospital. For the rest of the world, the story proved an irresistible romance: A 14-year-old princess who had escaped such a horrible fate, and re-emerged unharmed and removed from danger.

Even in the face of two serious challenges, she stood firm. Baroness Buxhoeveden, a lady-in-waiting to the royal family who had escaped Russia, visited Anderson at the mental hospital and immediately dismissed her assertions. In response, Anderson claimed the baroness had betrayed the royal family and did not wish to be exposed. Then, in 1927, a young Berlin woman told a German newspaper she recognized Anderson as her former roommate, Franziska Schanzkowski, a Polish farm worker.

Until last week, that was all that was known of the woman who claimed to be a princess. But the tests of the British team have revealed there is only a 1-in-300 chance that Anderson was not Schanzkowski, a working-class Polish girl.

While the real Anastasia was growing up in the luxury of the imperial Russian Court, learning French and English, Anderson, four years her senior, had determined to break free from the Polish provinces. She went to Berlin, was engaged to be married as World War I was breaking out, and found a job in a munitions factory.

But in 1916 her fiance was killed on the Western Front. Soon after, she accidentally let a grenade slip from her hands on the factory line and it exploded, tearing a foreman to pieces before her eyes. Depression overcame Schanzkowski, and the last sign of life her family received from her was a postcard to her favorite brother on his birthday in February 1920.

Shortly afterward, Anastasia would be resurrected.

Among her most ardent followers was Prince Frederick Sachsen Altenburg, a German aristocrat whose Prussian cousin had compared memories of Romanov holidays before 1914 with Anderson's. Two others were Grand Duke Andrew, and Grand Duchess Xenia, who married a wealthy American industrialist.

But the immediate relatives of the Romanovs refused steadfastly to accept her.

Yet even with such loyal followers, Anderson's troubled life seems to have benefited little from the illusion of being a lost princess. In Charlottesville, where she spent her last years after marrying historian Jack E. Manahan, she was known as Annie Apple, a mad local.

When she received her rare visitors, they were shocked by the state of her home. ``The stench of half-empty dog bowls, open tins of food and dried-up dog dirt is enough to make you vomit,'' wrote one. ``Amid all the trash lies the mattress. On it is the tiny figure of Anna Anderson in a matted tangle of blankets.''

Shortly before her death, Anderson was forcibly committed to a psychiatric clinic, and in an act of desperation Manahan, who believed in her claims to the end, attempted to abduct her. After a wild car chase that ended with the vehicle surrounded by policemen holding rifles, they surrendered. Two months later Anderson died.