The people who rejected the claim were in some cases operating under similar conditions. Some of them had reasons — political, social, financial — that could be said to bias them toward rejection. The opponents of Anderson’s claim included Romanov relatives who would have faced legal and financial complications if she had been recognized, and who had signed public declarations against her.
But the pattern of skepticism among those closest to Anastasia — her aunt Princess Irene, her father’s surviving sister Grand Duchess Olga — is notable. These were not people with obvious financial motives for rejection; they were close blood relatives whose personal knowledge of Anastasia was intimate and direct, and they both concluded they were looking at a stranger.
What the Anderson case also reveals: the difficulty of disconfirming an extraordinary claim once it has been invested with sufficient emotional and institutional energy. The German court case lasted more than thirty years. Books were written, documentaries made, films produced, fortunes spent, careers devoted to arguing one side or the other. The claim took on a life independent of its evidentiary merit.
The DNA test was an intervention that bypassed all of that investment. It did not argue with the supporters or engage with the case that had been built. It simply described what was present in the biological material, compared it to known references, and reported the result.
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## What Anderson Believed
Whether Anna Anderson — or, on the balance of evidence, Franziska Schanzkowska — believed her own claim is a question that the available record does not settle and that this article does not attempt to answer.