In the Anderson case, the comparison was between Anderson’s tissue and Karl Maucher’s blood, with Maucher’s relationship to Franziska Schanzkowska established through documented genealogy. The match supports the claim that Anderson shared Maucher’s maternal line — that they are, in the maternal DNA sense, relatives.
The contextual evidence that narrows the field is what makes the identification specific. The available maternal-line relatives of the Schanzkowska family were not an enormous group, and the timing of Franziska’s disappearance from Berlin in early 1920 — exactly contemporaneous with the appearance of the unidentified woman at the Landwehr Canal — is difficult to explain as coincidence. The physical descriptions, the psychiatric history, the factory worker background, the documented presence in Berlin: each element individually might be coincidental; together, they form a convergent picture that the DNA completes.
Forensic geneticists use the term “consistent with” to describe a match that supports an identification without being sufficient alone to establish it. The Maucher match is consistent with the Anderson-Schanzkowska identification. Combined with the historical and circumstantial evidence, it supports that identification to a high degree of probability. The 1-in-300 figure represents the probability that the match was coincidental — that Anderson and Maucher shared the profile without being related — which is to say, a very low probability indeed.
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## The Institutional Management of Uncertainty
One of the subtler dimensions of the Anna Anderson case is how various institutions managed uncertainty across the decades — how courts, churches, governments, and media organizations dealt with a question they could not definitively answer.
The German courts’ approach was procedurally rigorous: gathering evidence, evaluating witnesses, and ultimately declining to make a finding when the evidence was insufficient. This was the appropriate use of the legal system’s evidentiary standards. But it left the underlying question unresolved in the public mind, and the 1970 ruling was widely interpreted as more than it was — as a kind of moral draw rather than a procedural determination of evidentiary exhaustion.