Robert Goddard - Found Wanting

‘What’s this got to do with Karl Vanting? Well, one day in October 1918, two people arrived in Suomenlinna in a small boat they said they’d rowed across the Gulf of Finland from Russia. One of them was Vanting. The other was a lad in his early teens. Vanting didn’t say anything about serving in the American army and he claimed he didn’t know what had been happening in Finland. Unfortunately for him, the prison commandant remembered him as a Red revolutionary. He and the lad – whose name wasn’t recorded – were locked up.

‘Conditions here in 1918 were terrible. Overcrowding. Disease. Famine. Vanting couldn’t have chosen a worse place to land. But he wasn’t here for long. After a few weeks, he and his companion were released on the recognizance of Paavo Falenius. And then… they dropped out of sight.

‘It gets even murkier now. Like Timo told you, the big unanswered question about Saukko Bank is where their influx of capital in the early nineteen twenties came from. Well, what you’ve found out fills in the gaps in a theory I thought was really off-the-wall when I first developed it, but now… fits together like Lego. A Danish invention, no? Lege godt . To play well. And they did play it well.

‘Paavo Falenius was a double agent. Not much doubt about it. Maybe the best kind. The kind both sides trust so completely you have to ask: which side was he really on? He was born in 1869. Studied law at St Petersburg University. One of his fellow students was Peter Lvovich Bark, who also went into banking and was the Russian Minister of Finance from 1914 until the Revolution. He fled to England afterwards, where he became Sir Peter Bark, a director of the Bank of England. Strange, no? But consider. Bark acted as executor for the Tsar’s estate after his presumed death. Only he knew how much money there was and where it was. Falenius was an old friend of his. I found photographs of them together in a university rowing team and later at banking dinners in Helsinki and St Petersburg.

‘I think I know what it all adds up to. The assassin your friend’s grandfather saved the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana from in Cowes in August 1909 was Karl Vanting. It was hushed up because Tsar Nicholas the Second knew he was his illegitimate half-brother. Vanting was banished to the Danish Virgin Islands in the hope he could be reformed. It sort of worked, at least for a while. But in 1918 he went to Russia with the American army – and vanished. Then he turned up in Finland with a young companion who was never officially identified. Well, I think that companion was – or became – Peder Aksden. I think Sir Peter Bark used some of the Tsar’s money to buy the young man a new life in Denmark and to buy the silence of those people who thought they knew who he really was.

‘And who were those people? Falenius gave us a clue when he changed the name of his bank. Saukko . Otter. Tolmar Aksden went to Norse mythology for the name of his company. Mjollnir. Thor’s magic hammer. I think he followed the example of the man who gave him the capital to start Mjollnir. But what’s the mythical significance of an otter? In Finnish myth, Tuonela is the land of the dead, from which no traveller returns. The only exception was the hero Vainomoinen. He crossed the river marking the boundary of Tuonela and was greeted by Tuonetar, goddess of the dead. She offered him some of the wondrous ale of Tuonela. He drank his fill. Then, while he slept it off, Tuonetar’s son built an iron net across the river, so that Vainomoinen couldn’t leave and would be trapped for ever. But, when he woke and saw what had been done, Vainomoinen changed himself into an otter and swam through the net back to the land of the living.

‘In 1918, Russia was the land of the dead. Vanting’s young companion escaped by changing himself into someone else. Hakon Nydahl persuaded his sister to take the young man in as a kind of replacement for the child she’d lost, supplied false records of his birth in Jutland and money for his new family. The money came through Falenius Bank, later Saukko, from the Tsar’s secret accounts controlled by Sir Peter Bark. Paavo Falenius skimmed off some for his own use. Some of the rest ended up in Mjollnir. And some in Nydahl’s safe at his apartment in Copenhagen. The markkaa his housekeeper stole were 1939 issue, right? Well, the signs were growing all through 1939 that Stalin would invade Finland. Falenius probably sent a large chunk of money to Nydahl because he was afraid the Soviets would overrun the country and close him down. He must have thought they’d send him to a gulag if his double dealing was found out.

‘As it happened, the Soviets were never able to conquer Finland. The Germans got involved again. And Field Marshal Mannerheim saved the country, as every Finnish schoolboy knows. So, Paavo Falenius lived on. And so did his bank. He died in 1957. He has a very fine tomb in Hietaniemi Cemetery. Poor Peder Aksden was dead by then, of course. An accident with a sickle, his daughter said? I can believe it. Sharp blades are dangerous things for haemophiliacs to handle.

‘You see now, Richard? The Tsar’s money. The nameless young man from Russia. The change of identity to slip through the net. Hakon Nydahl’s sister thought she was adopting the Tsar’s haemophiliac son, Alexei. Crazy, no? But they were crazy times. No one knew for sure what had happened to the family. Rumour, rumour, rumour. But nothing certain. Vanting told some tale of rescuing the boy to atone for trying to kill his sisters. Did Falenius believe him? Maybe. More likely he reckoned he could persuade others to believe him. Was that how he extracted the money from Bark? By threatening him with a convincing impostor? Or by convincing him the young man wasn’t an impostor? Dagmar, the Dowager Empress, was still in the Crimea at the time. She didn’t leave until spring 1919. So, Bark had to act without consulting her. And he had to stick by his actions. Maybe, if he believed Vanting’s story, he thought it was better to let the Tsarevich heal his body and mind in the seclusion of the Danish countryside and to keep his survival secret – even from his grandmother – in case the Soviets sent assassins after him. The young man may have had no clear memory of who he was or what had happened to him. If he was Alexei, he’d been through a traumatic experience. But, then again, maybe Bark never believed the story for a moment. Maybe he paid up to avoid the damage a false Alexei, manipulated by Falenius, could do. The same goes for Nydahl. He knew Vanting from his days in the West Indies. What did he think he was getting himself involved in? Or was he just following orders from Dagmar’s nephew, King Christian the Tenth of Denmark, to bury the problem before the old lady came home? The possibilities are endless. We’ll never know now.

‘Whatever the truth behind it was, the plan worked well. But then a young woman showed up in Germany claiming to be Alexei’s sister, Anastasia. And many people believed her, including several members of the Romanov family. If she was formally acknowledged, she’d get control of her father’s estate and find out where a lot of his money had gone. So, she had to be stopped. And what better way could there be of doing that than supplying a set of fingerprints that proved she couldn’t be Anastasia? Bark had made powerful friends since arriving in London. I think he arranged through them to send Clem Hewitson to Copenhagen at some point in 1925, probably the autumn, with the fake prints he was instructed to claim he’d taken on board the imperial yacht in August 1909. He and Nydahl were going to travel to Berlin, where Anna Anderson was in hospital, fingerprint her and expose her as a fraud.

‘But something went wrong. Maybe Hewitson started to think Anna was genuine and wasn’t willing to cheat her out of her inheritance. Or maybe he found out from Nydahl what was really going on. Bark’s friends in the British Establishment wouldn’t have known about his arrangement with Falenius. If Hewitson exposed that, there’d have been a big rethink. In the end, though, it would still have been hushed up. The fingerprint plot against Anna Anderson would have been abandoned, but Bark’s other deal would have been quietly overlooked. The Tsar’s unclaimed deposits at the Bank of England, which Bark controlled, bought a lot of silence. Anyway, Anna Anderson never did win acknowledgement as Anastasia, did she? They wore her down over the years.