In 1915 the young Kirchberg entered the Gymnasium Zum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, a secondary school with a Christian and academic focus in Magdeburg.
He stayed on at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin) where he held a succession of junior academic post, and from where he received his doctorate in 1937 for work on "The processing of minerals according to their Thermal Properties"[2][4] Between 1938 and 1943 he worked as a senior scientific research assistant at the Kaiser William Institute for Iron Research (as it was known at the time) in Düsseldorf.
[2] War had resumed in September 1939 following a Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression pact that opened the way for a repeat partition of Poland between the two dictatorships.
Helmut Kirchberg was expelled to the west, ending up in the Soviet occupation zone of what had previously been Germany.
While rector, he was instrumental in the creation of the Academy's "Research Institute for Preparation" ("Forschungsinstituts für Aufbereitung"), which many regarded as his crowning achievement and which he himself headed up for almost eighteen years until his retirement in 1971.