Daily News from New York, New York • 421

II mini iiiiiiwiiiiiiiiiiiiiii i' i SUNDAY-NEWS, NOVEMBER 12, 1961 cottage of her patron into an adjacent prefabricated house for which sb paid $8,300. She had become a virtual recluse, re- lusmg to see reporters or photographers, 'M accessible only to her lawyer, ner house-' sg worker, and a neighbor, Mrs. Monica von Militiz. f'irwBKsasiaa judges began an all-out effort to settle the Anderson-Mecklenburg litigation once and for all. They listened to scores of witnesses, pored over hundreds of papers, for and against Anna's claim.

i i 1 s- r. vj inis lime mere were several witnesses to say it was common knowledge in Russia in 1918 that one of the grand duchesses had escaped assassination. A former member of the Red Cross said the train on which he rode was stopped and searched in Siberia in 1918 by Russians looking for Anastasia. To counteract the assertion of the tutor, Gilliard. 78.

that Anna was never his pupil, there was the testimony the former imperial riding master, Felix Dassel, 90. that he taught Anastasia to ride and that she was Anna Anderson. mer Princess Xenia. now Mrs. Herman Jud, who had Anna in her home on Long Island for six months.

"She never acted in a manner which would not have fitted her claim to be Anastasia of Russia." said the princess. "Her voice, her pose, her command of words fitted into this 5 picture. She did not play a role but acted natural, although most" of the time she -was ill and depressed. I observed in her many of the peculiarities of the Czar's i family." The presiding judge. Wilhelm Welt-f meister.

sent one ofis confreres. Judge Mrs. Anna Anderson made one of her rare appearances in 1955. Anna Tschaikowsky as she looked in ihe lafe 1920s. witnesses in the United States, Canada, iMigiana nu i ai i.

cu'r nmi. Anderson refused to come to Hamburg the presiding judge sent Backen to see her in the Black Forest, where her cottage is protected by fences and hidden by bushes and apple trees. "She wouldn't see me!" Backen reported. Does She Know Russian? Actually, he did see him, but she refused to discuss details r-f the rase with him. or let a court-appointed interpreter assess her command -t Russian.

She knew Russian, she said, hut had vowed, at the time her family was killed, never to Feak the language again. Her refusal to talk to tras a tremendous tartical error Anna's finrt and her lawyer tnnet have convinced her of this, for she did rgrem submit to the examination I'rcf. Otto Heche. i In a C2-page summary liecbr, a vetrld famous etnthrofe-higixt, concluded that he found rot the slightest rvsrm-blamee between Anna Anderson and the Schanzkowxki family; but listed It points which linked her triA the Romanovs. He supported her claim.

Mina Becker, a handwriting expert, supported her claim, too. "There is no room for doubt that Anna Anderson is Anastasia." said the graphologist in a 67-page report. "In her writing in Russian and Iatin alphabets, Anastasia made certain mistakes in forming particular letters. Photographic enlargements of Anna Anderson's hand show the same mistakes." It looked as thought the tide was turning. But Berenberg-Gossler.

lawyer for the Duchess of Mecklenburg, is no slouch. He attacked these experts and everyone else who favored Anna's claim. And he offered the testimony or affi--davits of 12 of Anastasia's close relatives to support his client's claim that Anna Anderson was an imposter. This impressed the court as much as Anna's refusal to testify for herself. Last May the three judges found that Anna' Anderson was not Anastasia.

The judges note of the fact that Anastasia spxke English and Russian perfectly, and only a little German. But when the- would-b suw-iHe faced her "aunts," there was rn evidence f.f recognition. She eyed. them nervously and spoke only German. "It would have leen the most natural thing in the world ft-r the real Anastasia to welcome her dear aunts spontaneously," said the court, adding that its rulinjf was based "to great estent cn Anna Anderson's failure to cooperate." Well, Anna is appealing again.

As she sees it, justice will never triumph until she is legally recognized as Grand Duchess Anastasia. She swears she is interested only in the name, not the money. If she gets the money the will give it away to charity, the cays. Meanwhile, Anna Tschaikowsky, who never got along well with anybody very long, had moved on the Castle Seeon in the Bavarian Alps, where her cause was espoused by the owner, Duke George von Leuchtenberg, a distant relative of the Romanovs. Knopf took Doris Wingender to Castle Seeon.

"Shf it Franziska," tnid Dor'it. "Get her out of here," yelled Anna from a tick bed. THE "expose" was published in the Nacht Ausgabe on April P. 1927. Anna's friends denounced it as the work of Hesse Darmstadt and said that Fraulein Wingender was a paid perjurer.

Another visitor to Castle Seeon was Gleb E. Botkin, son of the court physician who was assassinated with the Toyal family at Ekaterinburg. As a boy, Gleb had played with Anas-tasia and had amused hereby drawing caricatures of court personalities and giving them animal heads. It was their private game. Botkin Befriends Her Now, at Castle Seeon, he played the again with Anna Tschaikowsky and she identified the caricatures by name, even as Anastasia had done fn the imperial palace more than a decade before.

Botkin was convinced that the woman was no impostor. Upon his return to the United States, where he had been living for some years he was able to interest wealthy Mrs. William B. Leeds, the former Princess Xenia of Russia irf the cause of Anastasia, her second cousin. Mrs.

Leeds invited the woman to live in her home on Long Island. Anna arrived in February, 192S. Three and one-half years latef Botkin, her loyal supporter, stormed, "She is her own worst enemy, antagonizing everyone who wishes to aid her by her ungovernable bursts of temper." During her stay in. America, Anna had broken with three different patronesses, the last of whom paid her expenses at a private sanitarium in Katonah, N. where she was registered as Anna Anderson.

Under that name she slipped out of the United States and back into Germany. And by that name, she has been known ever since. Throughout her stay in America, she was called a swindler by most of Anas-tasia's bona fide relatives, and 11 of them signed a statement to that effect in Paris. But Grand Duchess Olga she of the head and heart took some of the sting out of this by saying, "Cer-tainly the woman believes she is Anastasia F.oikin charged that the deluge cf denunciation and repudiation, ttemmcd from the Romanov' dexirr to defraud Anna of a huge fortune. It van reported that Anaxtasia'g father, etaxhrd nun if great rumt in bankt in the United State and xmall turn in Germany and deposited $20,000,000 in.

the Bank tf England to be divided among Ait four daughters. Suits to establish rights to this hidden wealth were filed by many Romanov relatives in many places but the one most vigorously pursued was begun in Germany by Hesse-Darmstadt and continued by his daughter Barbara, Du-hesai of Mecklenburg. In 1933, while Anna Anderson was In an institution for the mentally ill, a German court decided that every member of the Czar's family died at Ekaterinburg and decreed that his German holdings should go to the heirs of the House of Hesse, which was the Czarina's family. Anna appealed this decision about the time she moved into her cottage at Unterlengenhardt in the Black Forest, a retreat provided by still another patron. But the clouds of war rolled in and nobody got around to the Anderson case until 1941.

The appeal was turned down. Then Dr. Vermehren offered his services gratis. He had asked Anna many questions and was impressed with her answers. Q.

When you found yourself In Bucharest, why didn't you go for help to your relative. Queen Marie Romania? A. In my unstable condition, I was ashamed of having the peasant's child. Q. Why didn't you recognize, your aunt.

Princess A. I felt so' hurt, helpless and angry at her sitting before me under a false name, I could not utter a word. 16-Year Investigation Now came another round of investigations one that took 16 long years. In addition to evidence which had been presented before, there was testimony from Hans Joachim Meyer, an Austrian prisoner of war in Ekaterinburg in July, 1918. Meyer swore he saw the execution of the Czar and his family and the bodies of six women.

Furthermore, there was testimony that Franziska. the Polish girl, had scars on her head from blows received in her childhood; injuries on her body from the explosion, a birthmark (mole) on her shoulder; and deformities of hands and feet caused by tuberculosis of the bones. Of seven anthropologists who studied Anna in person and Anastasia by records, only one supported Anna Anderson's claim. In January, 1957, a dixtrict cfittrt in TlVf lirrlirt rulrd that Anna Anderson va rcaNy Franziska and the court ixxued a certif irate naming Ditches Christian Ludicig (Barbara) Zti Mecklenburg a heirts to the Czar's fortune in Germany. Through her lawyer, Fran Anderson asked the court to declare the certificate invalid.

Anna had now become a sort of left-hand celebrity, famous or infamous depending on whether you did, or you did not, believe in her. Articles, books, plays and movies had appeared telling the Anastasia story. Anna Anderson profited sufficiently from royalties she wrote one book herself to move her canaries, cats and wolfhounds out of the crumbling Former Princess Xenia of Russia, when she was Mrs. William Leeds. Grand Duke was outraged because "the imposter" said she saw him in St.

Petersburg in 191 when Germany and Russia were at war and all loyal Germans stayed on their own side of the Western front.) So a private detective, Martin Knopf, was employed by the newspaper to conduct the next investigation. He started with the premise that the mystery woman could understand Russian hut could not speak it. Then he assuned she grew up speaking a related native tongue like Polish. He searched records of Polish girls reported missing in Berlin. One of these was Franziska Schanz-kowski, born Dec.

16, 1896, in the Polish village of Borowieslass. She left the family farm for Berlin in 1915, was injured in an explosion in a defense plant where she worked and spent three years in a mental hospital. In November, 1919. Franziska returned to the Berlin house where she had previously rented a room. Doris Wingender, the landlady's daughter, told the investigator that the girl stayed for 10 weeks and during that time kept a picture of the Czar and his family on her table.

Then, on Feb. 15, 1920, she disappeared Fraulein Wingender told Knopf she never linked the vanished roomer with the girl who was rescued from the canal two days later not even in 1922, when Franziska reappeared at the Wingender home wearing a camel's hair coat, a lilac-colored dress and -a green felt hat. She stayed with the Wingenders several days, explaining that "the Russian emigre with whom I have been living has kept me almost a When Franziska left the Wingenders she" traded her garments for Doris' dark Llue coat and light blue hat. "I still have her things," Doris said," and she showed them to Knopf..