Anna Anderson's claim to be Grand Duchess Anastasia


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ChatNoir said:
Don't worry, Gilliard had to confess in the Hamburg court that he had been telling, eh, untruths. Why do you think he burned his papers?
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This is the sort of statement for which backup material from an original source is necessary. Even if you've posted it before.
 
Elspeth said:
This is the sort of statement for which backup material from an original source is necessary. Even if you've posted it before.
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Unfortunately I don't have the right to post it here since the translation is copyrighted. But it can all be found in the transcripts from the Hamburg court.
 
Are the transcripts online anywhere? You can always post a link to them along with a short summary in English.
 
If you have hard copies of the transcripts and they aren't online, then we'll need details of the title, publisher, date of publication, etc, so that people who are interested will be able to identify them and, if they wish, get hold of a copy.
 
I do not have a hard copy, to my knowledge they have not been published. The records of AA's case have been moved from the Hamburg Court of Appeals (Oberlandesgericht) into state archives in Germany. Copies of most if not all of the actual transcripts, affidavits and lawyers' briefs are in London with Ian Lilburn and also at Darmstadt, thus representing both sides in the case.
 
OK, so if they haven't been published and they aren't available online, how did you come by them?
 
ChatNoir said:
Unfortunately I don't have the right to post it here since the translation is copyrighted.
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Copyright law allows the reproduction of up to 20% of the material with due attribution. There should be no problem in quoting a small part of the transcript to verify your statement.
 
Sorry, my hands are tied here.
Instead, let me give you a snippet from Aucleres I as reproduced in Kurth's book:

Now the interrogation began in earnest. The questions went on for hours - "When? What day? Where? What time? How long?" - until Gilliard, increasingly flustered and tired, was left to mumble over and over, "I don't know. I don't know anymore."
"Ordinarily," said Judge Werkmeister dryly, "a witness who knows that he is going to be heard finds a way to freshen his memory."
"M. Gilliard lowered his head," wrote Dominique Aucleres, "like a bad schoolboy who's been reprimanded." She felt sorry for him: "In his hands he was nervously twisting a copy of his bible, The False Anastasia. He hadn't reread it very well; he had overestimated his powers.
But now the judges did turn their attention to the contents of The False Anastasia. They wanted to examine some of the original documentation - above all, the excited letter Shura Gilliard had received in 1925 from Grand Duchess Olga, the letter that had first moved the Gilliards to meet Anastasia in Berlin.
"I don't have it anymore."
Then what about Gilliard's correspondence with the Duke of Leuchtenberg: "Is it true that you failed to reply to three of his letters?
"Yes...no....I don't know anymore."
"In The False Anastasia," said the judge to Gilliard, "you published certain photographs and handwriting specimens. We would like to see the originals. If you don't have them with you, the tribunal asks that they be sent."
Gilliard fairly cried the words:"I don't have them anymore! They're burned! I destroyed them. I have nothing anymore."
 
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What year was that supposed to have happened? Was that the 1958 trial? The man was 79 years old, he may have been 'confused' or having a senior moment, it doesn't mean he lied. Isn't this also when he left, crashed his car on the way home and was an invalid the rest of his life?
 
Anna was Franziska said:
What year was that supposed to have happened? Was that the 1958 trial? The man was 79 years old, he may have been 'confused' or having a senior moment, it doesn't mean he lied. Isn't this also when he left, crashed his car on the way home and was an invalid the rest of his life?
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Correct, he died a few years later. And no papers were ever found that were reproduced in False Anastasia.
As for being confused, may I quote a passage from Peter Kurth:
The irony was lost on no one who knew the story; who knew about another "thorough interrogation" that had taken place in Berlin more that thirty years before.
 
Anna was Franziska said:
What year was that supposed to have happened? Was that the 1958 trial? The man was 79 years old, he may have been 'confused' or having a senior moment, it doesn't mean he lied. Isn't this also when he left, crashed his car on the way home and was an invalid the rest of his life?
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Why do you always seem to think that elderly people don't know what theya re talking about? I don't think he was "confused" for a second. If Gilliard said he burned his papers, he burned them.
 
ferrymansdaughter said:
Why do you always seem to think that elderly people don't know what theya re talking about?
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Because, sometimes they really don't.

If Gilliard said he burned his papers, he burned them.
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You take him at his word? But I thought he was a 'liar?' It always happens, if he says something you and Chat want to believe, he's telling the truth, if not, he's a liar.

Even if he did burn them it doesn't necessarily mean he had anything to hide. He could possibly have burned them because he was fed up with the whole mess and didn't want to deal with it anymore.
 
My grandmother was supposedly bedridden. My mother went out for a very short time and when she came back all the family photos were burnt. My grandmother said she was sick of them...... I have no photographs of her or my mother as a child. We were very upset to find that the only photograph of her younger brother in the Cavalry and killed in WWI had gone up in smoke too. Older people can sometimes do these things. My grandmother had just turned 80 and seemed to be very lucid.
 
Gilliard said he burned his papers more than 20 years before his testimony in Wiesbaden in 1958.
 
Gilliard said he burned his papers more than 20 years before his testimony in Wiesbaden in 1958.
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His testimony as written in Auclere's book (posted) doesn't say when.

You just never know when they might turn up! Look at this!
Burnt Hendrix guitar to be sold in London - Yahoo! News

Menarue, I am so sorry about your family photos, I know how that feels. I have an elderly aunt who threw away many one of a kind photos of people there were only one picture, including the only one ever taken of a great great grandmother. It's a terrible loss that can never be replaced, all because of one minute of bad decision making.
 
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It's not so important to me that AA be AN, what is important to me, is that you and others get to know the real story. From what I have seen posted on this forum and others, I realize that very, very few people really know anything about AA.
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We already know the real story. It's been proven so many times. I don't think Chat, will be able to explain why AA is A, now since there is so much evidence against that. He can't prove the DNA wrong. People just refuse to accept reality. AA isn't important anymore, because she's not Anastasia she's an imposter. DNA is the most important evidence of all. Hearsay isn't.
 
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I wouldn't get your hopes up too far; people are too fond of a good mystery.
 
Aren't we getting a bit off topic here? We have threads for the DNA evidence and for this latest find of the two bodies.
 
How can it be a mystery when it's solved and we have the answers? That would be like pretending a movie continued after the ending credits. It becomes something that doesn't really happen and is only a silly imaginary game.
 
Anna was Franziska said:
His testimony as written in Auclere's book (posted) doesn't say when.
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Actually, it does. From Peter Kurth:

"Hastily he explained that he had burned his "Anastasia" dossier after the negative ruling of the High Court in West Berlin, thinking that the case was closed."

The ruling was in 1933. Gilliard was then 54 years old. Hardly senile at that age.
 
So from this extract of a published book, it would appear that he burned the papers because he thought the case was closed. Which is a litle different from your original comment which started this digression, which was "Don't worry, Gilliard had to confess in the Hamburg court that he had been telling, eh, untruths. Why do you think he burned his papers?"

It would appear that he burned his papers because he thought the case was closed, not because he had been telling, eh, untruths. I think we're still waiting for backup for the "telling untruths" assertion. Surely this is a major enough story that it appears somewhere other than some obscure trial transcripts stored somewhere in Germany.
 
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