If Anderson were Franziska Schanzkowska, she would share this same maternal line, and her mtDNA would be expected to match Maucher’s exactly (or nearly so, accounting for the possibility of a rare mutation across generations).
The exact match that the testing produced — identical mtDNA profiles between Anderson’s material and Maucher — is therefore consistent with Anderson being Franziska Schanzkowska. The probability estimate of 1 in 300 that this was coincidence reflects the rarity of the specific mtDNA profile in the general population.
What this match cannot do: prove that Anderson was specifically the individual named Franziska Schanzkowska, as distinct from any other member of the same maternal line who might exist. If Franziska Schanzkowska had sisters, or maternal cousins, or other maternal-line relatives, they would all share the same mtDNA profile. The identification as specifically Franziska relies on the convergence of circumstantial historical evidence with the biological finding — the disappearance from Berlin in early 1920, the physical descriptions, the psychiatric history, the ambiguous recognition by Felix Schanzkowska — rather than on the DNA alone.
The DNA does what DNA can do: it establishes a biological relationship. The human record does the rest.
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## The Six-Position Difference: Reading the Exclusion
The mtDNA comparison between Anderson’s profile and the Romanov maternal line produced a finding of six positional differences in the hypervariable control region (specifically hypervariable region 1, or HV1).
Mitochondrial DNA’s hypervariable region is used in forensic and population genetics because it mutates at a higher rate than other regions of the mitochondrial genome, making it more variable between individuals and more useful for distinguishing maternal lineages. Even so, closely related maternal lines share very similar HV1 profiles, and the same profile can be shared by many individuals whose maternal ancestry traces to the same population.