The Berlin Asylum Patient Who Claimed to Be Grand Duchess Anastasia for Sixty-Three Years and Was Disproved by DNA Eleven Years After Her Death
Anna Anderson was pulled from a Berlin canal in February 1920 and claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, surviving daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. She maintained the claim through forty-five years of litigation and three biographies. DNA analysis in 1994 — three years after her 1984 cremation — identified her as the Polish factory worker Franziska Schanzkowska.
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