"[1] Fischer was born on July 27, 1881, in Höchst, now a city district of Frankfurt located in Germany.

His parents were Dr. Eugen Fischer, Director of the firm of Kalle & Co. [de], Wiesbaden, and Privatdozent at the Technical High School, Stuttgart, and Anna Herdegen was his mother.

He worked first at a Medical Clinic in Munich and then at the First Berlin Chemical Institute under Emil Fischer.

Under Muller, he began to examine the composition of the bile pigment bilirubin, something he would continue to be engaged in during the decades that followed.

He continued his scientific research during Germany's Nazi era, and committed suicide on Easter Sunday in 1945, after his laboratory and life's work had been destroyed by the bombing in the last days of World War II.