[1] After his family moved from Weiden and Bayreuth to Munich and after he had finished school he was drafted for military service during World War I.

He stayed with Otto Hönigschmid's group, where he was involved in the supervision of PhD students, for example Josef Goubeau and Günther Rienäcker.

During this period he studied the structure of complex anions formed by metals in a solution of sodium in ammonia.

Working in an atomic weight laboratory as a student assistant had provided him a lot of experience with chemical elements and how they react with each other.

[3] In 1933 he moved to a position at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where a new building for inorganic and physical chemistry was planned and built.