Alexander Koenig

Making use of the family wealth earned from the sugar business, he went on collection expeditions and founded what is now known as the Museum Koenig in Bonn in 1912.

Koenig was born at St Petersburg, Russia, the third son of his father Leopold (1821–1903) who was a successful merchant involved in the sugar trade.

He married Caroline and obtained a loan from his mother-in-law to establish a successful sugar factory and at the height of the business they employed nearly 20000 people and held farms across Ukraine.

He then studied zoology at the universities of Greifswald, Kiel, Berlin and Marburg, where he received his doctorate in with a thesis on Mallophaga, "Ein Beitrag zur Mallophagenfauna".

He funded expeditions to the Spitzbergen region of the Arctic and to Africa, where he visited Egypt and Sudan along with his wife Margarethe — on six separate occasions he traveled to the Nile.