The strain was isolated by Rimpau 1942) from a pateint in Germany, who considered it to belong to the former Australis B group (later named Pyrogenes group). In this publication no name of the isolate is given. Wolff (1953) found the strain to be different from Ballico. It appears already in 1954 in the list of Wolff and Broom as a recognized serovar muenchen with strain name Munchen C 90 in the Australis roup.
The strain was submitted to factor analysis (Kmety, 1960) and later is was suggested that it should be placed in the subgroup Jalna (Dikken and Kmety, 1978).