The Resurrection of the Romanovs (35 page)

What more could be done? Who else could come forward and offer a definitive opinion? “I did contemplate going to see the claimant,” Lord Mountbatten wrote to his cousin Prince Ludwig, son of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, “but on the advice of my mother never went for, after all, I was only twelve-years-old the last time I saw Anastasia as I missed seeing her in 1914 when we could all have been together but for the war. Although I was very fond of Anastasia I do not think my evidence would be of any value since we were both such children the last time we had met.”
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The one person who knew Anastasia far better than Mountbatten, Olga Alexandrovna, Princess Irene of Prussia, Princess Xenia Georgievna, or the Botkins unfortunately never saw Anderson. From shortly after the turn of the century until 1917, when she was removed from the Alexander Palace, Anna Vyrubova had seen the imperial family nearly every day. She spent hours with the empress and her children at Tsarskoye Selo, joining the Romanovs on their annual cruises, and traveling with them to the Crimea and to Poland on holidays. But amazingly, no one—on either side of the issue—ever sought her opinion, for Vyrubova, who had escaped to Finland and eventually became an Orthodox nun, was best known as one of Rasputin’s most ardent disciples. “We decided not to bring Madame Vyrubova into the case because of her involvement with the Rasputin clique, and its many intrigues,” Tatiana Botkin explained. “This whole Rasputin group had a very bad reputation, and it was believed that Madame Vyrubova’s involvement in the case could only have hurt.”
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And despite suggestions from some who believed that Anderson simply feared such a meeting, the claimant’s opponents shared the same concerns: Lord Mountbatten and Prince Ludwig of Hesse briefly considered asking for Vyrubova’s opinion but, in the end, elected not to do so, fearing that this would introduce the specter of Rasputin into the case.
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And so it seemed destined to remain a perpetual enigma. Decades of conflicting assertions and contradictory recognitions and denunciations, books, films, a legend that seemed increasingly plausible—and still there was no answer. There was no going back—and now the only way forward, the only hope that this most extraordinary of modern mysteries would ever be resolved, lay in what was to become the most extraordinary of modern trials: Anna Anderson’s monumental, mammoth lawsuit to finally prove that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.

16

The Trials

In the end, and fulfilling the fears of Anna Anderson’s supporters, her quest for recognition as Anastasia all came down to money. In 1906, Nicholas II had deposited 2 million rubles (approximately $20 million in 2010 figures) in Berlin’s Mendelssohn Bank; frozen at the beginning of the First World War, the money remained forgotten, and economic depression and inflation reduced its worth to a mere $105,000 (in 2011 currency). Then, in 1933, the Central District Court in Berlin, on the assumption that the imperial family was dead, awarded certificates of inheritance for the money to seven collateral Romanov heirs: Nicholas II’s sisters Grand Duchesses Xenia and Olga Alexandrovna; his sister-in-law Nathalia, Countess Brassova, morganatic wife of his murdered brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich; Michael and Nathalia’s son George; and Empress Alexandra’s remaining three siblings, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, Victoria, marchioness of Milford Haven, and Princess Irene of Prussia.
1

No one collected any shares, though, at least not in 1933. The Mendelssohn Bank, presumably hoping to prevent distribution, contacted Anderson’s lawyer Edward Fallows, suggesting that he protest any payments based on his client’s claimed identity. As an American, Fallows could not pursue the matter, but two German lawyers, Paul Leverkuhn and Kurt Vermehren, took Anderson’s case and lodged a petition to halt distribution with the Central District Court in Berlin. The arguments and appeals that followed set in motion Anderson’s mammoth, thirty-seven-year legal battle to prove that she was Anastasia.

And mammoth it certainly became. Although the Mendelssohn funds were eventually paid to the subsidiary heirs, Anderson’s lawyers filed repeated motions seeking revocation, and the courts repeatedly rejected the petitions. The Second World War brought a temporary halt to legal proceedings, but in 1956 the case finally came before the Landesgericht, the High Court in Berlin. Their review was cursory: after accepting the conflicting evidence into the record, the court heard only one witness, a former prisoner of war in Ekaterinburg of dubious reputation named Hans-Johann Mayer. With a flourish, Mayer produced a collection of captured Bolshevik documents confirming the deaths of all of the imperial family.
2
The court accepted Mayer’s evidence and rejected Anderson’s appeal; only later was it learned that Mayer had forged his apparently impressive dossier.
3

Leverkuhn and Vermehren were set to appeal this decision when they decided to change tactics. Rather than contest the inheritance, they would sue one of the beneficiaries in civil court, charging that Anderson, as Anastasia, had been financially defrauded.
4
They needed a defendant, someone who had profited from the distribution of the Mendelssohn funds, and a German defendant at that, to keep the case within national borders. Eventually they settled on Barbara, Duchess Christian Ludwig of Mecklenburg, a woman born two years after the presumed executions in Ekaterinburg and someone who had never met the claimant. As the granddaughter of Princess Irene, she had received a small share of the Mendelssohn monies, something that made her a convenient legal target, but there seems to have been something more cynical at work here. Barbara was the daughter of Prince Sigismund of Prussia and niece of Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, two of Anderson’s greatest supporters. In suggesting her as defendant, the two apparently believed that Barbara lacked the fortitude to endure a lawsuit and the attendant publicity, and that she could be pressured into reaching a settlement with the claimant.
5

Barbara, though, was not so easily bowed, and she did the one thing Sigismund, Friedrich, and Anderson’s lawyers had avoided: she brought Ernst Ludwig’s only surviving son, Prince Ludwig, into Anderson’s case. Ludwig also had received Mendelssohn funds, but none of Anderson’s proponents wanted him involved, for the Hessian royal family had, in the past, demonstrated a willingness to oppose—and very publicly oppose—Anderson’s claim by funding their own investigations into her case. Prince Ludwig’s decision to join Barbara as a voluntary codefendant in the civil suit was, for the claimant’s supporters, ominous enough; but it also brought the British royal family into the struggle, in the person of Lord Mountbatten, first cousin to Anastasia and uncle to Queen Elizabeth II’s consort, Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh. “It is completely out of the question,” Mountbatten wrote to his cousin Prince Ludwig, “that any of us would not have acknowledged Anastasia with the greatest of ease if we had had the remotest hope that she were not a fake. . . . The honor and memory of Aunt Irene and of course of your father and mother, and my mother, and indeed all of us are at stake in this case. The suggestion that for some unworthy pecuniary or prestige motives we would be unwilling to acknowledge, and of course, receive into our midst someone of whom we were as fond of as Anastasia is quite unthinkable and I am sure that this unworthy suggestion must be fought to the bitter end.”
6
Armed with the financial resources Barbara and Ludwig lacked, Mountbatten now stepped in and funded their opposition to Anderson’s claim.
7

The civil suit of Anna Anderson against Barbara, Duchess Christian Ludwig of Mecklenburg, opened in March 1957 before a three-judge tribunal at the Hanseatic Landesgericht Court, the High Court, in Hamburg. It shifted the burden of proof to the claimant: it was up to Anderson’s lawyers to prove that she was Anastasia. Misfortune seemed to dog Anderson’s legal team. Fallows had died, exhausted and impoverished by working on her case, in 1940, and Leverkuhn died in 1960 during the civil trail. Two years later, when Vermehren was fatally injured in a car accident, Carl August Wollmann assumed responsibility for her case. Hans Hermann Krampff acted as counsel for Prince Ludwig, but responsibility for the defense rested with Gunther von Berenberg-Gossler, a highly tenacious, thirty-six-year-old lawyer who, declared one of Anderson’s supporters, “looks like an out of work playboy. His appearance in court is theatrical, which may sometimes suit the superficial public, but his harangues are shallow.”
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Berenberg-Gossler never met Anderson, only glimpsing her in passing during a temporary court session at Unterlengenhardt, but to Michael Thornton, a young English barrister who held her power of attorney in Great Britain, he warned, “She will win you over. I know enough about her to assure you that she has the greatest degree of suggestive power over other people that I have ever encountered in all my years as a lawyer.”
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After his brief, silent encounter with the claimant, Berenberg-Gossler insisted rather snobbishly that “she resembled a house maid, not at all of royal blood,” with “an unattractive, peasant-like face” that “reminded me of a charwoman.”
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Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig and his family, 1912. From left: Prince Ludwig, who became a codefendant during the Anderson civil trial, Grand Duchess Eleonore, Prince Georg Donatus, and Ernst Ludwig.

The trial became a nearly four-year spectacle, during which hundreds of witnesses took the stand and offered testimony, providing a mass of conflicting claims that eventually filled dozens of bound volumes. On May 15, 1961, the Hanseatic Landesgericht Court rejected Anderson’s claim to be Anastasia, deeming the contention to be “unfounded.” Her lawyers, read the tribunal’s opinion, “failed to offer sufficient proof that the plaintiff is one of the Imperial children.”
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In response, Wollmann petitioned the Hanseatic Oberlandesgericht, the High Court of Appeals in Hamburg. Not only had the Hamburg tribunal, he declared, rejected testimony solicited from its own experts, but also the lawyers believed that the court had imposed a double standard on witnesses. Those who refuted the idea that Anderson was Anastasia, or who supported the deaths of the entire imperial family in 1918, had rarely been questioned, and the tribunal had simply accepted their evidence; those who had recognized Anderson as Anastasia, on the other hand, had been subjected to judicial cross-examination and their opinions disputed. After reviewing the case, the Oberlandesgericht Court found that the Hamburg tribunal had evaluated the evidence in a prejudicial manner, and allowed Wollmann to challenge the verdict. This appeal, which opened in April 1964 before a three-judge tribunal of the Hanseatic Oberlandesgericht Court in Hamburg, became, in essence, a second trial, in which all of the evidence was again examined.
12

And it all took place without Anderson’s cooperation. “She has never taken any interest or part in the efforts made on her behalf to establish her identity,” said a supporter.”
13
This apparent disinterest lent an aura of authenticity to her claim; surely, even the skeptics thought, a pretender would do all within her power to prove her case. “I know perfectly well who I am,” Anderson once declared. “I don’t need to prove it in any court of law.”
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It was, said one of the ladies who looked after her at Unterlengenhardt, “a matter of pride” to ignore the proceedings.
15

Anderson lawyer Carl August Wollmann, with journalist Dominique Auclères.

In her place came two determined and dedicated supporters who were, for all practical purposes, unpaid members of Anderson’s legal team. The first, Ian Lilburn, was an assistant at the Royal College of Arms in Great Britain; as a keen genealogist and amateur historian, he became fascinated with her case and attended every session of her appeal in Hamburg. Though he believed absolutely in her claim, Lilburn found that dealing with Anderson was often fraught with difficulties. “It is impossible to persuade her with logic,” he noted, “and it is useless to tell her that she ‘must’ do anything (she only becomes more stubborn and wants to show who is the boss).”
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The second figure, French journalist Dominique Auclères, had initially been assigned to cover the case for
Le Figaro
; convinced that Anderson was Anastasia, she chased down favorable witnesses; collected asserted evidence; and, as Peter Kurth noted, “maintained only the professional appearance of neutrality” in offering her readers an increasingly partisan series of articles about the claimant.
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The two Hamburg trials offered up weeks of arguments over Anderson’s asserted memories, and on the contentious issues of recognitions and denunciations. The question of Anastasia’s possible survival from the executions in Ekaterinburg was, at the time, at least a historical plausibility, and the courts heard evidence from those who had heard rumors of rescue and testified that the grand duchess had supposedly stayed in Bucharest following her escape from Russia. There were, though, more objective attempts to resolve the claimant’s identity. In 1963, Ian Lilburn purchased nine of the imperial children’s school exercise books at auction; two had belonged to Anastasia, and he hoped that they might still contain her fingerprints.
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The Oberlandesgericht Court received them into evidence, and experts examined the books for any latent prints but could find nothing of use; several smudges seemed promising, but at the time authorities did not possess the means to retrieve any prints without completely destroying the documents.
19

Anastasia’s two exercise books, though, did take center stage when the question turned to Anderson’s linguistic capabilities. This was a morass of conflicting and questionable assertions, spanning her knowledge of Russian, English, French, and German. Anderson refused to set foot in the courtroom, but she correctly answered questions posed in Russian by an expert, although she did so in English; however, nothing—not even when one of the judges attempted to sing to her in Russian—could convince her to speak the language.
20
Berenberg-Gossler called in graphologist Georg Dulckeit, who examined several notes the claimant had written in the 1950s in Russian and found fault with her composition and grammar, suggesting that her understanding of the language was superficial and tenuous at best.
21
This, though, was not particularly convincing, given that Anastasia’s own Russian essay book for 1913, received into evidence by the court, was full of grammatical and spelling errors.
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