Bertrand Goldschmidt was born in Paris on 2 November 1912 to a French mother and a Belgian father of Jewish origin.

[1] He entered the Paris School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in 1932[2] and was recruited to the Radium Institute in 1933 by Marie Curie.

He taught for a short time in Montpellier, until the post-surrender Vichy government changed the status of Jews under pressure from the Germans.

Enrico Fermi later asked Goldschmidt to join him at Columbia University as one of the group of scientists working on the project which would later initiate the world's first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the Chicago Pile-1 experimental reactor.

In November 1949, he and his collaborators Pierre Regnault, Jean Sauteron, and André Chesne extracted the first few milligrams of plutonium from the spent fuel from the Zoé nuclear reactor at the Bouchet plant in Ballancourt-sur-Essonne, an essential step for the production of the French atomic bomb.