For 60 years, she convinced princes, courts, and the world she was the surviving Romanov princess. DNA testing in 1994 proved she was a Polish factory worker.
In February 1920, a young woman with no identification tried to drown herself in a Berlin canal. Rescued and committed to a psychiatric hospital as 'Miss Unknown,' she eventually claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia — the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, supposedly the sole survivor of the Romanov massacre.
Her claim quickly gained believers. Russian émigrés who had actually known Anastasia visited and came away convinced. She knew intimate details of court life, spoke in ways consistent with someone raised in the imperial household, and bore a physical resemblance to the grand duchess. Several Romanov relatives endorsed her.
The German courts became consumed by the case for decades. Anderson sued to be legally recognized as Anastasia — the litigation dragged on from 1938 to 1970, when the courts finally ruled the matter 'neither established nor refuted.' It was the longest civil lawsuit in German legal history.
She moved to the United States in the 1960s, married an eccentric Virginia history professor named Jack Manahan, and lived in Charlottesville until her death in 1984. Even in her final years, she attracted devoted believers and hostile skeptics in equal measure.
In the 1990s, DNA from a tissue sample saved before her cremation was compared against a known relative of Franziska Schanzkowska — a Polish factory worker who had gone missing from Berlin around 1920. The mitochondrial DNA matched perfectly. Anna Anderson was definitively identified as Schanzkowska.
The real Anastasia's fate was confirmed when the Romanov remains were fully identified in 1991 and 2007. All nine family members and servants were accounted for. No one survived. Anderson's story remains one of history's most remarkable and sustained deceptions — whether consciously performed or genuinely believed.