The museum was founded by the private scholar Alexander Koenig (1858–1940) as a private institute for zoological research and public education. Alexander Koenig, who was born in 1858 as the son of the wealthy merchant Leopold Koenig, began to collect birds and mammals as a boy. He later studied zoology and received a doctorate in natural history in 1884. In the following years he organized and funded several expeditions to the Arctic and Africa and greatly expanded his private collection of specimens.