Anderson was observed by virtually all who met her early in the Berlin period to be a native German speaker. She also spoke some Polish. Her command of Russian was, by most accounts, marginal. Her French was similarly poor.
This linguistic profile is difficult to reconcile with a claim of Romanov identity on pure probability grounds. A girl raised at the Russian court with French and Russian as daily languages would not, under ordinary circumstances, lose those languages more completely than she retained German in the years following a hypothetical escape. Language loss can follow extreme trauma, but the pattern of what was lost and what was retained in Anderson’s case was noted by skeptics from early in the controversy.
Supporters offered several explanations. Anderson herself claimed that the trauma of her experiences — the execution attempt, the subsequent journey through war-torn territory — had affected her memory and her facility with languages. Supporters also pointed out that she would have needed German-language ability to navigate Germany, and might have reinforced that competency while neglecting languages that were of no practical use to her.
Physical characteristics were also discussed extensively. Anderson’s height was noted in early accounts — she was shorter than Tatiana but the comparison to Anastasia was plausible. The presence of certain scars and physical characteristics was pointed to by some supporters as evidence consistent with injury during an escape. Skeptics noted that the evidence was ambiguous and that scars can be attributed to many causes.
Bunions of a particular type were noted by some observers who saw both Anderson and photographs of the real Anastasia. The anthropological and physiognomic analysis by Otto Reche pointed to similarities in facial structure. None of these analyses was conclusive in isolation, and the development of more rigorous methods of biometric comparison over subsequent decades has generally not been applied to the case in ways that would add significantly to the record.