He was born in Diedenhofen, then part of Germany, and received his early education there.
Following his doctorate, he continued to work at the laboratory as an assistant to Kossel, where he studied X-ray transmission through thin crystal foils.
Due to his refusal to join the Nazi Party, he was forced to leave the laboratory in 1938, upon which he went to work with Max von Laue at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie (KWI).
)[1] Following the war, in 1951 Bormann was offered the Kristalloptik der Röntgenstrahlen department of the KWI.
In 1996, the German Crystallographic Society honored Gerhard Borrmann pioneering work in X-ray diffraction with the inaugural Carl Hermann Medal.