Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, who had served as a lady-in-waiting to the Tsarina and had known the children closely, rejected Anderson’s claim. She also made an early observation — that Anderson appeared too short to be Tatiana — that had contributed to the shift in the identification from Tatiana to Anastasia.
Pierre Gilliard, the French tutor who had taught the Romanov children and had known Anastasia for years, rejected Anderson emphatically and wrote a book arguing against the claim. He later became convinced that Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska.
Lord Mountbatten, a relative of the Russian imperial family, rejected the claim. Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, hired a private detective to investigate and concluded from the investigation that Anderson was an impostor.
The investigation by the detective hired by the Grand Duke of Hesse produced the first documented identification of Anderson as Franziska Schanzkowska. In 1927, the Berlin newspaper Der Nachtausgabe published the claim that Anderson was a Polish factory worker who had disappeared in early 1920. Schanzkowska’s brother Felix visited Anderson. His response was notably ambiguous: he said there was a strong resemblance but did not definitively identify her as his sister. He did not sign a document confirming the identification, though he also did not sign one denying it.
The Schanzkowska family’s reluctance to definitively identify Anderson added a layer of ambiguity that supporters of the Anastasia claim exploited for years. The argument ran: if Anderson were merely their missing relative, why wouldn’t her own family confirm it? Skeptics answered that the family had reasons not to be drawn into a public controversy that offered them nothing.