At the age of ten Dehmelt enrolled in the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, a Latin school in Berlin, where he was admitted on a scholarship.
[5] After graduating in 1940, he volunteered for service in the German Army, which ordered him to attend the University of Breslau to study physics in 1943.
After his release from an American prisoner of war camp in 1946, Dehmelt returned to his study of physics at the University of Göttingen, where he supported himself by repairing and bartering old, pre-war radio sets.
He created the first geonium atom in 1976, which he then used to measure precise magnetic moments of the electron and positron with R. S. Van Dyck into the 1980s, work that led to his Nobel prize.
In May 2010, he was honoured as one of Washington's Nobel laureates by Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden at a special event in Seattle.