In August 1979, a surgeon in Charlottesville, Virginia, removed a piece of intestine from an eighty-two-year-old woman, and the hospital kept it. Fifteen years later it answered a question that had run since 1920: was she the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia?
This is the story of Anna Anderson: the bridge in Berlin, the asylum, the visitors who said yes and the ones who said no, a pianist, a lawyer, a corporation selling shares in a fortune that did not exist, the longest lawsuit in German history, and the DNA that settled it.
Chapters
0:00 The Piece the Hospital Kept
1:31 Part One: Miss Unknown
4:13 Part Two: The Visitors
6:18 Part Three: The Brother
8:00 Part Four: The Heiress
9:53 Part Five: The Long Trial
11:38 Part Six: The Piece
Sources
Wikipedia, “Anna Anderson”, drawing on Kurth (1983), Klier and Mingay (1995), Massie (1995) and King and Wilson (2011).
Gill et al., Nature Genetics (1994), and Stoneking et al., “Establishing the identity of Anna Anderson Manahan”, Nature Genetics (1995).
Wikipedia, “Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia” and “Murder of the Romanov family”.
Where sources disagree (the origin of the hair sample, what Felix Schanzkowski said at the inn, the 1938 meeting) the video tells each version.
Illustrations are original artwork made for this video. Narration, music and sound design are original.
source
