In 1911, he traveled as ship's doctor with Wilhelm Filchner to Antarctica, but did not participate in the expedition to the Weddell Sea due to appendicitis.
At South Georgia he cured himself out and met his wife, the daughter of Carl Anton Larsen, the founder of the whaling station at Grytviken.
In 1931, he joined the Nazi Party, and later undertook, partly on behalf of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, expeditions to Tanganyika Territory in search of "primitive man".
He and his wife Margit performed excavations at the Mumba cave where they found a numerous Middle Stone Age artifacts.
Due in part to his politics, but also to dubious scholarship, Kohl-Larsen is not highly regarded amongst contemporary East Africanists.