He became an assistant of Hermann Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin from 1886 until 1891, where he also received his habilitation.

His son Kurt Wohl (1896–1962) – who also became a renowned chemical scientist – emigrated to Great Britain in 1939 and some years later to the United States.

Wohl arbitrarily defined the structure of (+)-glyceraldehyde to have the D-configuration, forming the basis for the D-L system.

Before the invention of x-ray crystallography the exact determination of the configuration at a chiral carbon atom was impossible.

By employing only chemical transformations with retention of stereochemical configuration, such an unknown chiral compound could be assigned either a D- or an L-configuration.