He presented a proposal that its proselytising highighting individual Jewish sages should be replaced with a peoples' mission which would provide for the recognition of Israel as a single overarching entity in unity with Jesus as Messiah.

[11] Soon he was filling 1,000 seat evangelical halls with his perorations, and in 1897 he teamed up with Heinrich Lhotzky to publish his own journal, the periodical "Blätter zur Pflege des persönlichen Lebens" ("Pages on taking care of the individual life").

Müller's many written pieces are today sometimes seen in the wider context of the so-called Judenmission (loosely "Mission to the Jews") as foreshadowing the political antisemitism that led to the Holocaust.

[12][13] With his continuing high-profile public activity as a "religious intellectual", he campaigned for a new free Christianity, and it was this that provided a personal justification for his own freelance existence.

They included the cookie magnate, Hermann Bahlsen, the Gutehoffnungshütte heiress, Elsa von Michael, the Count of Solms-Laubach, Walter Luetgebrune, later known as a lawyer for right-wing extremists.

Müller introduced special one-week seminar sessions at reduced price for students: the next year the same deal was made available to theologians and teachers.

[8] The two men worked together to design and develop an elaborate sanatorium-like retreat in the fashionable Reform Architecture style at the Elmau site.

[19] Max von Baden, a well-connected aristocrat-politician who on at least one occasion described Johannes Müller as his spiritual guide, and who later (briefly) became Chancellor of the German Empire, presided over the opening ceremony.

[7] At Elmau, Müller created a "Sanctuary of Personal Life" ("Freistätte persönlichen Lebens") where he hoped to be able to help lead "people of today" ("„Menschen von heute") along a path the nature of which corresponded to the meaning of Jesus' ethics.

Müller talked up the war as "Crisis of Healing" ("Heilkrise") which would confront humanity with the bankruptcy of its civilisation and awaken it from vacuousness ("aus ihrer Wesenlosigheit").

[22] Schloss Elmau guests also included Maurus Gerner-Beuerle, later a longstanding "Domprediger" at Bremen, Eivind Berggrav who subsequently became the Bishop of Oslo and the writer Erich Ebermayer.

[17] It was at the recommendation of Adolf von Harnack that in 1917 the Theology Faculty at Berlin University conferred an honorary doctorate on Johannes Müller.

Travel was no longer so difficult and Johannes Müller embarked on a succession of lecture tours, including in his itineraries Norway, Sweden, Hungary, the Netherlands and Denmark.

[7] The respected commentator Ricarda Huch wrote in outrage that after initially distancing himself from Hitler, Müller had not merely reversed his position but "given vent to a full throated Hosanna" ("brülle aus voller Kehle Hosianna").

[11] In a particularly enthusiastic outburst, referencing modern communications technology, he described Hitler as "the receptor of God's government and transmitter of the eternal rays" ("das Empfangsorgan für die Regierung Gottes und Sender der ewigen Strahlen").

[24] Müller's outspoken rejection of Nazi antisemitism led to him being branded a "friend of Jews" ("Judenfreund"), and he became the target of a press smear campaign.

[7] According to one source he avoided arrest at this time only because the Bavarian Chancelry convinced the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels that Müller's principled backing of German Jewry added a moral dimension, otherwise hard to discern among Nazi backers, which could be of benefit in terms of government image-building.

[7] In 1942, three years after the outbreak of another war, Johannes Müller agreed to rent out Schloss Elmau to the army for use as a convalescence establishment for soldiers returning from the front line.

A year later a demand came through from the commander at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp that Johannes Müller should be arrested "for seriously degrading [the national war effort] while pretending to be a respectable citizen" ("wegen schwerer Zersetzungsarbeit unter dem Deckmantel des Biedermannes").

However, Johannes Müller was not arrested presumably because his reputation remained sufficiently intact, and probably supported by an intervention from the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick (who had himself never even visited Schloss Elmau).

In 1946 Johannes Müller faced a form of trial before Philipp Auerbach, the Bavarian Commissioner on race-based, religious and political persecution.

[7] A related application that Schloss Elmau should be confiscated failed, initially because Elsa Countess of Waldersee, who was still a part owner of it, refused to sell her share.