[1][2][3] Aron Cohn was born into a Jewish family in Stuhm (as Sztum was known at that time), in West Prussia, a short distance to the south of Danzig.

[4] According to an otherwise uncorroborated mention in a condolence book from the time of his death, his father died at a relatively young age, leaving his widowed mother to bring up the family on her own.

[4] It was also during or very shortly after 1895, aged just 24, that he started his own business, devising and commercialising the feed formulation "Müllers Mais-Melasse", which incorporated molasses and a corn-glucose based ingredient imported from America.

Contacts with the rapidly mechanising and consolidating agriculture sector made him acutely aware of the growing shortage of warehouse space for newly harvested farm crops.

The business flourished, benefitting from a campaign being run by the Prussian government, backed by a budget of 4.2 million marks, to encourage the construction of barns for crops and livestock.

[7] For the first International Air Transport Exhibition,[a] held at Frankfurt in 1909, Arthur Müller constructed all the airship hangars at his own risk, and rented them out to the organisers.

The previous day, Müller had held an informal meeting in the second class waiting room at Niederschöneweide–Johannisthal station, close to the intended airfield site.

[8] Up till now Zeppelin landings and the first trials with winged aircraft at Berlin had taken place on military training areas such as the Tempelhofer Feld: it was becoming apparent that the development of civil air travel was being held back by the absence of any more suitable facilities than these.

[1] It was envisaged that the running of the airfield would be financed by entry fees from visitors making use of the anticipated daily passenger flights or attending special events.

The event was a great public success, but in strictly financial terms results were disappointing: expenses and fees paid to the "flying stars" and other celebrities for their participation were not matched by revenue from ticket sales.

The Forstfiskus would be prepared grant a lease for the airfield site to the successful and eminently solvent businessman Arthur Müller (which included, by implication, a company controlled and backed by him).

Also included in the deal was a stipulation that Müller personally should have a right of first refusal in respect of the 300 hectare airfield site acquired for a "substantial price" by the "Tagafia" company.

The most high-profile case involved his former friend and business partner, the lawyer and regional government law officer August Eschenbach who had come to the rescue in 1909 during a cashflow crisis, with a substantial investment in Müller's building construction company, "Land und Industriebauten".

In order to press the matter more effectively, Eschenbach joined with fellow flying club member Otto Wiener (who was also a senior director with Albatros Flugzeugwerke) and with various other members of the aviation establishment, to make very public the defamatory accusation that Arthur Müller had founded his own aircraft manufacturing company, LVG, only as a device for extracting investment capital from the fledgling aviation industry.

Under the headline "The Swamp" the banker-journalist Ludwig Lenn-Eschwege produced a meticulously detailed piece about the founding and financing of the "Tagafia" company and of the Johannisthal Air Field which was deeply critical of Arthur Müller's supposed motives, and was reprinted by the respected specialist journal "Die Bank".

In it Lenin, as he subsequently became known, included the so-called "Tagafia scandal" as a case study in the iniquities of capitalism, making reference to the "spectacular deceit" (... "tollen Betrug") which Müller had allegedly organised.

[12] By the time this rebuttal appeared Müller had resigned from the boards of "Tagafia" and of the air field company, which were the two entities drawing the most voluminous of the media criticism.

[4] The next month it became apparent the Germany had lost the war, and the "negotiations" that produced the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 put an abrupt end to thoughts of an aerospace boom.

There were some aircraft entrepreneurs and workers who quietly switched their attention to gliders while others wondered if a more promising industrial future for Germany might lie in automobile production.

The focus of "Arthur Müller Bauten- und Industriewerke" (AMBI), his new venture, was initially on pioneering building materials, based on innovative combinations of basic and readily available ingredients such as cement, sand, plaster, clay and coke ash.

Most of the manufacturing continued to be produced in the Berlin area, but reflecting the weight of some of the products involved and the associated transport costs and challenges, there were also factories in Breisach, Kassel, Köslin, Merseburg and Neuruppin.

In the end there were also branch offices in the larger population centres such as Breslau, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, Königsberg, Leipzig, Mühlhausen, Munich and Nuremberg.

The focus of the agreement was on all-steel car bodies, based on manufacturing techniques pioneered and developed by Edward G. Budd 1870 - 1946, which drove a complete reconfiguration of the Automotive industry in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.

After 1918 Rumpler had attempted to reinvent itself as an automobile manufacturer, but eight years later it succumbed to economic pressures: the company liquidation early in 1926 had left the factory looking for a new owner.

The largest customer, in volume terms, was Adler, a mid-market hitherto conservative manufacturer, keen to expand in order to compete more directly with market-leaders Opel and DKW by including smaller cars in its range.

However, in 1987, following the expiry of the subsequently mandated standard sixty-year term and in the absence of further interest from family members, the plot was "dissolved", ready for reassignment.

The family received many letters of condolence from Müller's former business partners and contacts, some from the early days of the Johannisthal venture, and including some from government backers or from people whom the National Socialists would later celebrate as war heroes.

Modern commentators raise the question of just how many of those people would have dared (or wished) to be so open in their displays of grief over Müller's death if he had died not in 1935 but in 1938, after there had been a further three years for the relentless racist government propaganda to infiltrate the minds of the citizens.

The prospects were better in respect of the relatively small number of family assets that had been physically located in the western half of Berlin or in other parts of Germany now under British, US or French administration.

Between 1945 and 1990, the German Democratic Republic, where the media were encouraged to follow the government line, Arthur Müller was mentioned, if at all, only dismissively, as a property speculator.