Marga Boodts

Marga Boodts (February 18, 1895 - October 24, 1976) was a woman claimed to be Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia. She was one of a considerable number of Romanov pretenders who emerged from various parts of the world following the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family at Yekaterinberg on July 18, 1918. She stands out, however, as one of very few who claimed to have been Grand Duchess Olga, the Tsar's oldest daughter.

Purported escape from Russia

By her own account, Marga Boodts survived the execution at Yekaterinberg when a member of the firing squad, whom she identified only as Dimitri, knocked her unconscious and pretended that she was dead.^[1] Dimitri placed her in a sack of hay, which was subsequently shipped to Vladivostok, and replaced her missing corpse with that of a young man who had been caught stealing from the bodies of the other members of the Imperial family. Fron Vladivostok, Boodts reputedly travelled through China and then, by sea, back to Germany.^[2]

Re-emergence and life in Europe

Boodts took her surname from Carlo Boodts, whom she married in Berlin on May 5, 1926 and divorced two years later.^[3] It was also while living in Germany that she claimed to have been recognized as Grand Duchess Olga by the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), who promised to provide financial support for the remainder of his lifetime.^[2] She once recalled that she had also promised the former Kaiser that she would never reveal her Imperial identity, and would "keep the secret of my survival throughout my life".^[1] According to Boodts, the former Kaiser subsequently arranged for the daughter of a friend, a Frau von Schevenbach, to provide her with accommodation. Boodts lived with Frau von Schevenbach until the latter's death, and, after the outbreak of war in 1939, moved into a villa at Lake Como in Italy.^[2]

Boodts' claim gained further credence from 1957, when she was recognised by Prince Sigismund of Prussia (1896–1978), who was a first cousin of the actual Grand Duchess Olga. He, in turn, introduced Boodts to the Hereditary Grand Duke Nickolaus of Oldenberg (1897–1970), a godson of Tsar Nicholas II, who provided her with financial support until his own death.^[2] As late as 1974, Prince Sigismund remained convinced of Boodts' authenticity. As he told journalists Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold, "we spoke about so many familiar matters that an outsider could not have known about, because they were things that had happened between us two".^[2] During this period, Boodts is also said to have received financial support from the Pope.^[4]

Living in Lake Como, Boodts remained in relative obscurity for many years and thus managed to avoid the sensational press overage (and the suspicion of surviving Romanov descendants) that had long plagued her rival Imperial pretender, the notorious Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.^[5] However, it was only in 1960, when Anderson took her case to the Hamburg Courts, that Boodts decided to make her own claims public. In an interview with United Press International, Boodts insisted that she had seen "her sister Anastasia" executed at Yekaterinberg, and had now come forward in an effort to discredit the "impostor" in Germany. She further stated that she was considering legal action of her own against Anderson, and was willing to "step into the Hamburg Courts to unmask her".^[1] Boodts, however, was apparently unaware that her new benefactor, Prince Sigismund, was also a firm supporter of Anderson's claims. Indeed, some of Anderson's strongest opponents (including Lord Mountbatten) cited Prince Sigismund's support of Boodts to discredit him as a witness in the Anderson case.^[5] For her own part, Anderson herself once admitted, in a taped interview with journalist Alexis Milukoff, that there was a possibility that Boodts may indeed be her "sister".^[5] The two women, however, never met, or even exchanged correspondence.

By contrast, Boodts is alleged to have met up with a far lesser-known Romanov pretender, Suzanna Catharina de Graaff, who claimed to have been the hitherto unknown fifth child of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, born after an alleged "hysterical pregnancy" in 1903. Mrs de Graaf's son stated that Boodts not only met his mother but acknowledged her claims, because Boodts herself had been old enough to remember the pregnancy in 1903.^[5] When Mrs de Graaf's son and his wife subsequently visited Boodts themselves, she reportedly "welcomed them as nephew and niece-in-law".^[5]

In 1960, Boodts also revealed to the press that she was currently working on her memoirs in collaboration with a close friend, the Baroness Irene Gräfin von Harrach (1910–1975).^[1] Their ambitious project was described as "a 300-page book containing a number of very important documents allegedly proving, without any shadow of doubt, that she really was the first-born daughter of the Czar".^[1] This book, however, was never published, and the present whereabouts of the manuscript are unknown.

In 1975, journalists Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold visited Boodts at her Lake Como villa as part of research for their book, The File on the Tsar. She reportedly declined to speak about herself, or past events, and that "nothing at all emerged from the meeting to support the notion that she was either the Grand Duchess Olga, or even a Romanov".^[2]

Death

Marga Boodts died of pneumonia in October 1976 at the purported age of 81 years. It is recorded that money for her grave had been set aside by her former benefector, the Prince of Oldenberg, who had himself died six years earlier. Her gravestone did not bear the name Marga Boodts but, rather, was inscribed (in German) with text that translated as "In memory of Olga Nikolaevna, 1895-1976, eldest daughter of Emperor Nicolas II of Russia".^[3] As there were no direct descendants to pay for its maintenance, the gravestone was destroyed in 1995, and Boodts' remains transferred to a common grave in the grounds of the cemetery.^[3]

Legacy

Boodts' claim to be the Grand Duchess Olga, which was taken seriously by very few people during her lifetime, was disproven thirty years later, when archaeological investigation and scientific testing finally confirmed that all six members of the Russian Imperial family had been murdered at Yekaterinberg in 1918.

On August 23, 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three years old. Anastasia was seventeen years, one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was nineteen years, one month old and her brother Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Anastasia's elder sisters Olga and Tatiana were twenty-two and twenty-one years old at the time of the assassination. Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber". The bones were found using metal detectors and metal rods as probes.

See also

• Romanov impostors

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Woman claims she is daughter of Czar, survivor of execution", St, Petersburg Times (Florida), February 12, 1960, p 20a
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Summers, Anthony and Tom Mangold. The File on the Tsar, pp 192, 347.
3. ^ ^{a b c} "Marga Boodts"; www.les-derniers-romanov.com. Retrieved January 12, 2010.
4. ^ Massie, Robert. The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, p 147.
5. ^ ^{a b c d e} Lovell, James Blair. Anastasia: The Lost Princess, pp 225-26, 426.

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Name	Boodts, Marga
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Date of birth	February 18, 1895
Place of birth
Date of death	October 24, 1976
Place of death