Marga Boodts

Marga Boodts (February 18, 1895 – October 13, 1976) was a woman who 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. She was also known as Maria Bottcher.

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 K., knocked her unconscious and pretended that she was dead. Dimitri K., who had been a Cossack soldier, replaced her missing corpse with that of a young woman who had been caught stealing from the bodies of the other members of the Imperial family. He later accompanied her to Vladivostok. Boodts claimed that upon her arrival to Vladivostok she was received by a German elite commando, and from Vladivostok, she reputedly said to have traveled through China and later she was taken by sea to Germany.

Re-emergence and life in Europe Boodts took her surname from Carlo Boodts, a German officer whom she married in Berlin on May 5, 1926 and divorced two years later. It was also while living in Germany that she claimed to have traveled to Doorn, the Netherlands, and visited Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), who recognized her as Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna.

Mother Pascalina Lehnert, governess of Pope Pius XII, declared in 1983 to have witnessed the special meetings between Boodts and the Pope and said that he acknowledged her as the real Grand Duchess Olga of Russia.

Living in Lake Como, Boodts remained in relative obscurity for many years and thus managed to avoid the sensational press coverage (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. 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".

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.