His father was at the time captain in the Royal Bavarian Infantry Guard Regiment (Königlich Bayerisches Infanterie-Leib-Regiment), who was soon transferred to Munich and would finally become a lieutenant general (Generalleutnant).

After serving as a one-year volunteer in the Bavarian first Field Artillery Regiment, he took interest in the color theory and began studying art at the Munich Academy of Painting (1891–1893).

He thereafter went to attend the University of Berlin to study chemistry under Emil Fischer and A. Rosenheim, and physics under E. Warburg and Max Planck; where in 1895 he received his doctorate.

Nevertheless, during the First World War, von Euler-Chelpin took part in voluntary service with the Imperial German Army in the artillery (1.

His son, Ulf von Euler, was a well-known physiologist and in 1970 he received a Nobel Prize for his research on the chemical nature of norepinephrine on the synapses.

In 1931, his daughter Karin von Euler-Chelpin married the writer Sven Stolpe and had four children with him (one of which was Lisette Schulman).

[1] In 1929, Euler-Chelpin and Arthur Harden received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for research on alcoholic fermentation of carbohydrates and the role of enzymes.