[1]: 7  His father, Heinrich Jacob Goldschmidt, (1857–1937) was a physical chemist at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum and his mother, Amelie Koehne (1864–1929), was the daughter of a lumber merchant.

His father's family was Jewish back to at least 1600 and mostly highly educated, with rabbis, judges, lawyers and military officers among their numbers.

[2] As his father's career progressed, the family moved first to Amsterdam in 1893, to Heidelberg in 1896, and finally to Kristiania (later Oslo), Norway in 1901, where he took over the physical chemistry chair at the university.

He worked on his thesis with the noted geologist Waldemar Christofer Brøgger and obtained his Norwegian doctor’s degree when he was 23 years old (1911).

On 26 October 1942 Goldschmidt was arrested at the orders of the German occupying powers as part of the persecution of Jews in Norway during World War II.

[4]: 23 Goldschmidt was flown to England on 3 March 1943 by a British intelligence unit, and provided information about technical developments in Norway.

[6][4]: 24  His British professional associates and contacts included Leonard Hawkes, C E Tilley and W H Bragg, J D Bernal, Dr W G (later Sir William) Ogg.

[4]: 26 For his thesis, Goldschmidt studied the Oslo graben, a valley formed by the downward displacement of a block of land along faults on each side.

[8][9] In the early 20th century, Max von Laue and William L. Bragg showed that X-ray scattering could be used to determine the structures of crystals.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Goldschmidt and associates at Oslo and Göttingen applied these methods to many common minerals and formulated a set of rules for how elements are grouped.