The skeptical side produced investigators like Pierre Gilliard, whose early-20th-century accounts argued against the claim, and later researchers who worked with the detective hired by the Grand Duke of Hesse in the 1920s. Their books argued that the Schanzkowska identification was established well before the DNA evidence, and that the persistence of the Anastasia claim reflected the power of wishful thinking over documentary evidence.
The DNA finding produced a new genre of accounts: retrospective analyses that incorporated the genetic results into the history. These accounts could acknowledge both the evidentiary force of the biological findings and the genuine complexity of the testimonial record — the fact that serious, credible people had disagreed, and that the disagreement was not simply a matter of some observers being wrong and others being right.
The most balanced treatments of the case acknowledge that the testimonial evidence was genuinely ambiguous — that human recognition in emotionally charged circumstances is fallible in both directions, and that reasonable people looking at the same evidence could reach different conclusions — while also clearly stating that the DNA evidence has settled the biological question.
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## The Sixty-Year Span: A Chronological Summary
For readers who want a single reference framework for the major events in the Anna Anderson case:
**Before 1920:** Franziska Schanzkowska is born approximately 1896 in Pomerania. She moves to Berlin in 1914. Her fiancé dies during the war. She suffers the factory accident in 1916 and subsequent institutionalization. She disappears from Berlin in early 1920.
**February 17, 1920:** An unidentified woman is pulled from the Landwehr Canal in Berlin and transferred to Dalldorf Asylum.