Dr. Botkin: The Russian Connection
In his book “Five Fingers Over You” Armin T. Wegner explained, in a letter addressed to his brother in 1927, the origination of the Russian branch of Wegner family.
Dietrich Ackermann, a ship owner in Stettin, and his wife Jeanette Sophie Christine extended their family by having twin girls Marie and Madeleine. After Napoleon’s defeat and her husband’s death, Jeanette moved to Russia with her children. Later, Marie returned to Germany and married Nikolaus Heinrich Witt, thus becoming Armin T. Wegner’s great-grandmother.
Madeleine stayed in Russia and married the Russian attorney Kryloff. Their daughter Anastasia Kryloff married Dr. Sergei Botkin, the famous physician who introduced many innovations to the medical field and later became known as the ‘father of Russian medicine’. He was the court physician for both Tsar Alexander II and Tsar Alexander III. As a matter of fact he was the teacher of Nobel Prize laureate, medical scientist Dr. Ivan Pavlov. His favorite son Dr. Eugene Botkin (photo) followed his father’s footsteps and became the court physician for Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
Ironically, Eugene’s brother Dimitri was killed in battlefield fighting against the Germans in 1914.
Dr. Botkin was so concerned about the well-being of the royal family, that when the Romanovs were exiled by the Bolsheviks, he insisted to accompany them and eventually was murdered along with the royal family in Yekaterinburg in 1918.
After the fall of Soviet Union the victims were DNA identified and reinterred with much ceremony in Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1998.
Botkin’s son Gleb, who managed to escape to America, became a novelist and illustrator and founded the neopagan Church of Aphrodite.