It is important to state precisely what the match does and does not establish. A match between Anderson’s mtDNA and Maucher’s establishes maternal-line relationship between them — they share the same female-line ancestor. It does not, by itself, identify which specific individual in the Schanzkowska maternal line Anderson was. The identification as Franziska Schanzkowska specifically, rather than some other maternal relative, rests on the convergence of multiple lines of evidence: the timing of Schanzkowska’s disappearance in Berlin in early 1920; the physical description matches; the psychiatric history; and the brother’s documented — if ambiguous — recognition. The DNA provides the biological anchor for an identification that history and circumstance support.
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## Why the Courts Couldn’t Decide What DNA Could
The 1970 German court ruling — that Anderson was neither proven to be Anastasia nor proven not to be — represented the limits of what the evidentiary tools of the mid-twentieth-century legal system could accomplish in a case of contested identity without biological evidence.
The case before the German courts was essentially a conflict between testimonial evidence on one side and testimonial evidence on the other. Supporters testified to recognition. Skeptics testified to non-recognition. Both groups included individuals who had known the real Anastasia. Their recollections, impressions, and convictions were the evidence. The courts could evaluate the credibility of witnesses, but they could not adjudicate the fundamental question of which group of direct observers was right.
This was not a failure of the legal system. It was the correct conclusion of a process applied to evidence that was genuinely inconclusive. Human recognition is imperfect. Memory is fallible. The years that had elapsed between the last sightings of the real Anastasia and the encounters with Anderson were long enough to permit honest disagreement among honest people. A woman in her early twenties who had experienced significant physical and psychological trauma would not look identical to the teenager those witnesses had known years earlier.