La mort d'Anastasia Romanov - TDM #2
Hello everyone, and welcome to this new episode of Theories of the World. Last time, we took a look at the ancient astronauts theory, for your information, you were 38% to believe in this theory, while you were 41% not to. Furthermore, you were 21% to have a mixed opinion. Thank you everyone for your participation in the comments.
I hope today's topic will interest you just as much, it's a bit different from the last one, since we shall take a look at a historical legend, that is to say, the mystery of Anastasia Romanov's death. [Credits: Theories of the World #2 : The death of Anastasia Romanov] Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova was the fourth daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. A member of the imperial family, her mysterious death was an enigma that made headlines for almost a century. In order to fully understand this theory, [History and context]
I need to briefly remind you of the story of the death of the imperial family.
And this story starts in 1917: Russia is then undergoing a revolution, for the Bolsheviks want to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. So there was the Russian imperial family that ruled Russia for several generations, and was composed of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei; the latter suffering from haemophilia, he will notoriously be cured by a character well-known thanks to the Fox studios: Rasputin. [Chistopher Lloyd's voice] : Rasputin! *Evil laugh* During the revolution, and after a few twists and turns, the family will be imprisoned by the provisional government. First at the Alexander Palace, then in Tobolsk, in Western Siberia, where they are transferred.
The quality of captivity is harsh here, the Siberian winter is coming. [Ned Stark] : Winter is coming. And the temperatures drop down to -38C (-36,4F). One month later, the family is transferred again.
They are brought to a "house of special purpose", the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, and detention is once again very hard. However, rumors and news circulate: the White Army, opponents of the Bolsheviks that detain the family, may soon reach Yekaterinburg. On top of that are rumors of escape, the guards become nervous and aggressive. It's no longer an option to bring Tsar Nicholas to Moscow to stand trial.
On Tuesday the 16th of July, at midnight, the family is brought to the basement. 3H and 15 minutes later, the commander announces that friends of the Tsar tried to save them. Thus, the family has to be executed. The former Tsar barely has the time to speak a single word before he's killed.
He's the first to die, at point-blank range, and the other hostages soon follow. The execution will only be three minutes long. Some will claim that Rasputin foretold it, when he said that once he died, Russia would fall into the Devil's grasp. ["Rasputin" by Boney M.] The following day, the bodies are loaded onto a truck, then moved to a nearby forest.
Burned and disfigured with quicklime, the victims are thrown into a mineshaft and buried later. That's the very moment the mystery of Anastasia Romanov begins. [The theory]
This theory is, that one of the Tsar's daughters, Anastasia, survived the execution of the imperial family. And this weird story starts like this: in an evening of February of 1920, on the edge of a canal in Berlin, a woman jumps into the water.
She's rescued and brought to a hospital, she's got no papers and stays silent. She's transfered one month later in an asylum. For one year and a half, she's an exemplary and rather calm patient. Except when it comes to take pictures of her.
One day, the unknown woman finds a newspaper article relating the events of 1917 with a picture of three of Nicholas II's daughters. When she looks flustered, her roommate tells her she knows who she is, the woman is said to have answered her to shut up. [R'n'B music] In March 1922, her roommate asks the captain of a former regiment of the Empress to meet the unknown woman. It turns out she can't speak Russian, and she doesn't recognize a picture of the Empress.
The captain judges the case to be quite serious and asks acquaintances of the imperial family to come see the young woman. In Berlin, the case attracts journalists and admirers. However, the visits have mixed results. On the one hand, some members of the court see no resemblance between the young woman and the Duchess, on the other hand, some claim the contrary.
The young woman, now calling herself Anna Anderson, will eventually be taken under the wing of Baroness Kleist, who will house her and help her to remember the events of her life before the revolution. During the following months, the unknown woman, who people nickname Annie, starts recounting the events. In the basement of the house in Yekaterinburg, that one night, the Duchess hid and passed out behind her sister Tatiana, who died instantly from the gunshots. She regained to her senses at the bottom of a cart pulled by two men and two women.
The men were brothers from the Bolshevik guard who refused to take part in the massacre. When they removed the bodies, they found out that the Duchess was still breathing, and decided to let her live and smuggle her out Russia. Anastasia then kept hiding from the Bolsheviks, and married one of the brothers. A child was supposedly born of this union in December 1918, but in a twist of fate, her husband is recognized by the Bolshevik agents and executed as a deserter.
The Duchess fell into depression, her child was taken away from her, and her brother-in-law disappears. All of these elements drove her to exhaustion, despair and eventually suicide in the canal. Anna will try to justify herself in many ways, but nevertheless, in May 1968, the tribunal of Hamburg rules against her, and the woman gives up. She eventually dies in the United States, in February 1984.
The evidence [From a medical point of view]
For the defenders of Anna Anderson, there are many similitudes between the two young women: a similar age, a physical resemblance to some extent, and on a medical note, she apparently bears the childhood wounds of the Duchess. [The testimonies]
In addition to this are the testimonies in her favor: Anastasia's nanny, one of her playmates, the daughter of the Tsar's physician, two German cousins, Grand Duke Andrei and many others immediately recognized her as the Empress. Flix Dassel, who knew well the four daughters in 1916, is highly sceptical of this story and tried many times to fool her by telling her false facts she swiftly corrected. He will finally testify again under oath in 1958, before his death, that he recognized Anastasia.
For some, she's surprising, and knows intimate details about the Grand Duchesses, like the affectionate name "Schwips" her sister Olga called Tatiana by, something few, very few people knew. [The memories]
Furthermore, an unsettling declaration from the young woman sows dissent. During an interview, she remembers and names an uncle "Ernie", actually Ernest of Hesse, the brother of the former Tsarina, and claims to have seen him for the last time in December 1916, in Russia. This claim implies that the prince was plotting to betray the Allies by clandestinely coming to an appointement in Russia to ask for a separate peace.
These newfound memories will bring many enemies to Anna, who don't want the unknown woman to be declared as the Duchess, and Ernest of Hesse denied everything. However, the claims of the young woman will later be confirmed. And other details make the death of the Duchess uncertain. [The death of the Romanovs]
During an interrogation, a soldier certified that a body was missing before they were buried, but the guards were such in a hurry to destroy any evidence of the massacre that they didn't bother to check.
In order to clarify this mystery, [Graphological studies]
a renowned graphologist studied the handwriting of both young women and claimed that the handwriting of Anna Anderson and Anastasia's were identical. But then, if Anna Anderson is indeed the descendant of the Tsars, [Possible explanations]
why have some members of her family not recognized her as such? To this question, Anna's advocates explain that some members ran the risk of losing their credibility by claiming to recognize the Duchess, and that the social pressure of the time didn't allow them to speak out loud. The interests at stake were indeed considerable from both a political and personal point of view. Grand Duke Kirill, the Tsar's cousin, now head of the Romanov family, and claimant to the crown, refuses to grant her a single interview, and rules the case as closed.
What was at stake was so important that Anastasia's resurrection could not happen. Thus, if Anna Anderson was the real Anastasia, perhaps the family secrets and the political and financial weight compelled her own peers to hide this truth. The counter-evidence Unfortunately for the young woman, many people question the entire veracity of her claims. Among the facts advanced to discredit the young woman, [Illogical elements]
we point out that when she was brought to the asylum, she couldn't speak Russian at all.
And even though some specialists agree that some trauma could lead to an amnesy of her own mother tongue, this point will greatly detriment her later. Though many people recognized her, [The testimonies]
almost as many judged her to not be the Duchess. For example, Baroness Iza, who knows the imperial children since they were born, and who was in the house of the massacre six weeks before it occurred, didn't recognize her, and neither did her grandmother, who refused to give her any credit. So we're very far from the happy ending of the animated movie.
And despite many elements in her favor, many accuse her of imposture, to be a fraud wanting to seize the Tsar's fortune. For them, the young woman could easily have pretended to be Anastasia, knowing that most people who could surely identify her were dead. Ernest of Hesse, who felt threatened by the girl's revelations, [Ernest's investigation]
hired a private investigator, Martin Knopf, who will claim that Anna's real name is Franziska, and that she's a Polish labourer. Finally, the bodies of the imperial family are found and exhumed in 1990, [Presumed end of the mystery]
then identified by a DNA analysis.
Two bodies are missing: Tsarevich Alexei's, and one of his sisters', Maria, or Anastasia. In 1994, Anna Anderson's DNA is compared with the Duke of Edinburgh's, Prince Philip, whose grandmother is the sister of Tsarina Alexandra, and the test turns out to be negative. Thus, Anna Anderson isn't a Romanov. In 2007, bones are found near Yekaterinburg, and are certified by the Russian leading expert in genetic expertise, Nikolai Nevolin, to be the remains of the imperial children.
[Why the lie?]
The French historian Jean des Cars, in an interview, explains that Anna Anderson was actually just a traumatized girl, who was tricked by crooks into believing in her prestigious identity so they could seize the imperial treasure. So, in the end? In the end, this mystery took up a large part of the 20th century, and some points are still the subject of theses: for instance, according to another theory, the massacre of Yekaterinburg never actually happened, or not completely, and the Empress and her four daughters were evacuated to Perm, where they were all seen being detained by at least one eyewitness. An Alexis Durazzo claimed to be the grandson of Maria Romanov, who would have died of cancer in 1970. And in 1957, Prince Sigismund of Prussia had recognized Maria after a meeting during which they told each other childhood memories.
This considerable mystery should nowadays have given away all of its secrets according to the DNA tests. That being said, supporters keep seeing in the stranger Anna Anderson the face of Anastasia Romanov. [Voice of the French historian Marc Ferro] : "The problem isn't the veracity of the DNA tests." "I'm utterly incapable of..." "Telling if these tests are valid or not." "What is dubious is," "Who was submitted to the DNA tests?" "Are these truly the skeletons of the imperial family, or others?" "Yet, I don't know if you noticed, these are always British laboratories" "that have identified the bodies and done the experiments." "So, why British?" "Well, because that's the English dynasty," "the Mountbattens, who are indirectly" "the heirs of the Romanovs in some way." And rumors even suggest than her grandmother, Maria Feodorovna, had confessed on her deathbed to have recognized her granddaughter. I hope you enjoyed this video, and I would like to remind that the Theories of the World aren't supposed to defend a point of view, but to give you all of the elements to make your own opinion.
So, like last time, I shall let you debate about this theory in the comments, until then, I say goodbye to you, see you very soon for a new episode..
I hope today's topic will interest you just as much, it's a bit different from the last one, since we shall take a look at a historical legend, that is to say, the mystery of Anastasia Romanov's death. [Credits: Theories of the World #2 : The death of Anastasia Romanov] Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova was the fourth daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. A member of the imperial family, her mysterious death was an enigma that made headlines for almost a century. In order to fully understand this theory, [History and context]
I need to briefly remind you of the story of the death of the imperial family.
And this story starts in 1917: Russia is then undergoing a revolution, for the Bolsheviks want to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. So there was the Russian imperial family that ruled Russia for several generations, and was composed of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei; the latter suffering from haemophilia, he will notoriously be cured by a character well-known thanks to the Fox studios: Rasputin. [Chistopher Lloyd's voice] : Rasputin! *Evil laugh* During the revolution, and after a few twists and turns, the family will be imprisoned by the provisional government. First at the Alexander Palace, then in Tobolsk, in Western Siberia, where they are transferred.
The quality of captivity is harsh here, the Siberian winter is coming. [Ned Stark] : Winter is coming. And the temperatures drop down to -38C (-36,4F). One month later, the family is transferred again.
They are brought to a "house of special purpose", the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, and detention is once again very hard. However, rumors and news circulate: the White Army, opponents of the Bolsheviks that detain the family, may soon reach Yekaterinburg. On top of that are rumors of escape, the guards become nervous and aggressive. It's no longer an option to bring Tsar Nicholas to Moscow to stand trial.
On Tuesday the 16th of July, at midnight, the family is brought to the basement. 3H and 15 minutes later, the commander announces that friends of the Tsar tried to save them. Thus, the family has to be executed. The former Tsar barely has the time to speak a single word before he's killed.
He's the first to die, at point-blank range, and the other hostages soon follow. The execution will only be three minutes long. Some will claim that Rasputin foretold it, when he said that once he died, Russia would fall into the Devil's grasp. ["Rasputin" by Boney M.] The following day, the bodies are loaded onto a truck, then moved to a nearby forest.
Burned and disfigured with quicklime, the victims are thrown into a mineshaft and buried later. That's the very moment the mystery of Anastasia Romanov begins. [The theory]
This theory is, that one of the Tsar's daughters, Anastasia, survived the execution of the imperial family. And this weird story starts like this: in an evening of February of 1920, on the edge of a canal in Berlin, a woman jumps into the water.
She's rescued and brought to a hospital, she's got no papers and stays silent. She's transfered one month later in an asylum. For one year and a half, she's an exemplary and rather calm patient. Except when it comes to take pictures of her.
One day, the unknown woman finds a newspaper article relating the events of 1917 with a picture of three of Nicholas II's daughters. When she looks flustered, her roommate tells her she knows who she is, the woman is said to have answered her to shut up. [R'n'B music] In March 1922, her roommate asks the captain of a former regiment of the Empress to meet the unknown woman. It turns out she can't speak Russian, and she doesn't recognize a picture of the Empress.
The captain judges the case to be quite serious and asks acquaintances of the imperial family to come see the young woman. In Berlin, the case attracts journalists and admirers. However, the visits have mixed results. On the one hand, some members of the court see no resemblance between the young woman and the Duchess, on the other hand, some claim the contrary.
The young woman, now calling herself Anna Anderson, will eventually be taken under the wing of Baroness Kleist, who will house her and help her to remember the events of her life before the revolution. During the following months, the unknown woman, who people nickname Annie, starts recounting the events. In the basement of the house in Yekaterinburg, that one night, the Duchess hid and passed out behind her sister Tatiana, who died instantly from the gunshots. She regained to her senses at the bottom of a cart pulled by two men and two women.
The men were brothers from the Bolshevik guard who refused to take part in the massacre. When they removed the bodies, they found out that the Duchess was still breathing, and decided to let her live and smuggle her out Russia. Anastasia then kept hiding from the Bolsheviks, and married one of the brothers. A child was supposedly born of this union in December 1918, but in a twist of fate, her husband is recognized by the Bolshevik agents and executed as a deserter.
The Duchess fell into depression, her child was taken away from her, and her brother-in-law disappears. All of these elements drove her to exhaustion, despair and eventually suicide in the canal. Anna will try to justify herself in many ways, but nevertheless, in May 1968, the tribunal of Hamburg rules against her, and the woman gives up. She eventually dies in the United States, in February 1984.
The evidence [From a medical point of view]
For the defenders of Anna Anderson, there are many similitudes between the two young women: a similar age, a physical resemblance to some extent, and on a medical note, she apparently bears the childhood wounds of the Duchess. [The testimonies]
In addition to this are the testimonies in her favor: Anastasia's nanny, one of her playmates, the daughter of the Tsar's physician, two German cousins, Grand Duke Andrei and many others immediately recognized her as the Empress. Flix Dassel, who knew well the four daughters in 1916, is highly sceptical of this story and tried many times to fool her by telling her false facts she swiftly corrected. He will finally testify again under oath in 1958, before his death, that he recognized Anastasia.
For some, she's surprising, and knows intimate details about the Grand Duchesses, like the affectionate name "Schwips" her sister Olga called Tatiana by, something few, very few people knew. [The memories]
Furthermore, an unsettling declaration from the young woman sows dissent. During an interview, she remembers and names an uncle "Ernie", actually Ernest of Hesse, the brother of the former Tsarina, and claims to have seen him for the last time in December 1916, in Russia. This claim implies that the prince was plotting to betray the Allies by clandestinely coming to an appointement in Russia to ask for a separate peace.
These newfound memories will bring many enemies to Anna, who don't want the unknown woman to be declared as the Duchess, and Ernest of Hesse denied everything. However, the claims of the young woman will later be confirmed. And other details make the death of the Duchess uncertain. [The death of the Romanovs]
During an interrogation, a soldier certified that a body was missing before they were buried, but the guards were such in a hurry to destroy any evidence of the massacre that they didn't bother to check.
In order to clarify this mystery, [Graphological studies]
a renowned graphologist studied the handwriting of both young women and claimed that the handwriting of Anna Anderson and Anastasia's were identical. But then, if Anna Anderson is indeed the descendant of the Tsars, [Possible explanations]
why have some members of her family not recognized her as such? To this question, Anna's advocates explain that some members ran the risk of losing their credibility by claiming to recognize the Duchess, and that the social pressure of the time didn't allow them to speak out loud. The interests at stake were indeed considerable from both a political and personal point of view. Grand Duke Kirill, the Tsar's cousin, now head of the Romanov family, and claimant to the crown, refuses to grant her a single interview, and rules the case as closed.
What was at stake was so important that Anastasia's resurrection could not happen. Thus, if Anna Anderson was the real Anastasia, perhaps the family secrets and the political and financial weight compelled her own peers to hide this truth. The counter-evidence Unfortunately for the young woman, many people question the entire veracity of her claims. Among the facts advanced to discredit the young woman, [Illogical elements]
we point out that when she was brought to the asylum, she couldn't speak Russian at all.
And even though some specialists agree that some trauma could lead to an amnesy of her own mother tongue, this point will greatly detriment her later. Though many people recognized her, [The testimonies]
almost as many judged her to not be the Duchess. For example, Baroness Iza, who knows the imperial children since they were born, and who was in the house of the massacre six weeks before it occurred, didn't recognize her, and neither did her grandmother, who refused to give her any credit. So we're very far from the happy ending of the animated movie.
And despite many elements in her favor, many accuse her of imposture, to be a fraud wanting to seize the Tsar's fortune. For them, the young woman could easily have pretended to be Anastasia, knowing that most people who could surely identify her were dead. Ernest of Hesse, who felt threatened by the girl's revelations, [Ernest's investigation]
hired a private investigator, Martin Knopf, who will claim that Anna's real name is Franziska, and that she's a Polish labourer. Finally, the bodies of the imperial family are found and exhumed in 1990, [Presumed end of the mystery]
then identified by a DNA analysis.
Two bodies are missing: Tsarevich Alexei's, and one of his sisters', Maria, or Anastasia. In 1994, Anna Anderson's DNA is compared with the Duke of Edinburgh's, Prince Philip, whose grandmother is the sister of Tsarina Alexandra, and the test turns out to be negative. Thus, Anna Anderson isn't a Romanov. In 2007, bones are found near Yekaterinburg, and are certified by the Russian leading expert in genetic expertise, Nikolai Nevolin, to be the remains of the imperial children.
[Why the lie?]
The French historian Jean des Cars, in an interview, explains that Anna Anderson was actually just a traumatized girl, who was tricked by crooks into believing in her prestigious identity so they could seize the imperial treasure. So, in the end? In the end, this mystery took up a large part of the 20th century, and some points are still the subject of theses: for instance, according to another theory, the massacre of Yekaterinburg never actually happened, or not completely, and the Empress and her four daughters were evacuated to Perm, where they were all seen being detained by at least one eyewitness. An Alexis Durazzo claimed to be the grandson of Maria Romanov, who would have died of cancer in 1970. And in 1957, Prince Sigismund of Prussia had recognized Maria after a meeting during which they told each other childhood memories.
This considerable mystery should nowadays have given away all of its secrets according to the DNA tests. That being said, supporters keep seeing in the stranger Anna Anderson the face of Anastasia Romanov. [Voice of the French historian Marc Ferro] : "The problem isn't the veracity of the DNA tests." "I'm utterly incapable of..." "Telling if these tests are valid or not." "What is dubious is," "Who was submitted to the DNA tests?" "Are these truly the skeletons of the imperial family, or others?" "Yet, I don't know if you noticed, these are always British laboratories" "that have identified the bodies and done the experiments." "So, why British?" "Well, because that's the English dynasty," "the Mountbattens, who are indirectly" "the heirs of the Romanovs in some way." And rumors even suggest than her grandmother, Maria Feodorovna, had confessed on her deathbed to have recognized her granddaughter. I hope you enjoyed this video, and I would like to remind that the Theories of the World aren't supposed to defend a point of view, but to give you all of the elements to make your own opinion.
So, like last time, I shall let you debate about this theory in the comments, until then, I say goodbye to you, see you very soon for a new episode..
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