The actual financial outcome of the litigation was ultimately negligible. The German court proceedings ended in 1970 without a determination, and no estate transfer occurred. Whatever Romanov assets had been held in German banks had largely become inaccessible or had been exhausted through legal proceedings and inflation. The stakes that had animated the early decades of the case had substantially diminished by the time the DNA evidence arrived.
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## The Newspaper Coverage and the Public Construction of the Story
The Anna Anderson case was not a private matter. It was, almost from the beginning, a public story — covered extensively by newspapers in Germany, Britain, and eventually the United States, and generating a body of popular writing that shaped public understanding of the case in ways that often diverged from the evidentiary record.
The German press was particularly active in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1927 newspaper report in Der Nachtausgabe identifying Anderson as Franziska Schanzkowska was a significant moment in the public history of the case — not because it settled anything, but because it established the alternative identity in the popular record alongside the Anastasia claim.
American newspapers covered her 1928 arrival with interest; the story of a possible Russian princess reaching the United States in the late 1920s, during a period of intense American fascination with European royalty and Bolshevik Russia simultaneously, had obvious appeal. Coverage tended toward the dramatic elements — the claim, the controversy, the European royalty who had met her — and away from the more granular evidentiary questions.