In September 1994, more than a decade after the woman known as Anna Anderson had died of pneumonia in Charlottesville, Virginia, two research teams announced the results of DNA tests on biological material she had unknowingly left behind.
A tissue sample, preserved in paraffin wax at a Virginia hospital following intestinal surgery she had undergone in 1979, was compared against mitochondrial DNA from a living relative of Tsar Nicholas II’s family — Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, whose maternal line connected him directly to Tsarina Alexandra. The results were unambiguous. The tissue from the woman who had spent more than sixty years claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov did not match the Romanov maternal line. Six differences in the hypervariable region of her mitochondrial DNA separated her from Prince Philip’s profile.
The same tests produced a second result: when her mitochondrial DNA was compared against that of Karl Maucher — a living relative on the maternal line of a Polish-German factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska who had gone missing in Berlin in early 1920 — it matched exactly.
Anna Anderson had not been Anastasia. She had almost certainly been Franziska Schanzkowska all along. And the question that had occupied journalists, courts, Romanov survivors, historians, and a large portion of the twentieth-century reading public for more than seven decades had been answered — not by a courtroom, not by a confession, but by biological material too small to see.
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## The Murder That Made a Myth Possible
To understand why Anna Anderson’s claim found such persistent traction across six decades, it is necessary to understand the specific nature of the uncertainty that followed the killing of the Russian imperial family in July 1918.