Born in the Dutch East Indies, he completed his studies in Rotterdam and Utrecht, defending his doctoral dissertation – an exploration of the influence of light on plant growth – in 1922.

He subsequently spent a decade in the Indies administering centres for sugar cane experimentation before returning to the Netherlands to replace his teacher Frits Went as Professor of Botany at Utrecht University.

Consequently, when the elder Koningsberger returned to the Indies in the early 1900s, Victor and his younger brother Jacob [nl] remained with relatives in the Netherlands.

Building on earlier studies by Anton Hendrik Blaauw, which hypothesized that the curvature of plants was affected by unequal lighting during growth, as well as more than a decade of laboratory work,[3] Koningsberger designed[4] and employed an innovative automatic precision auxanometer that allowed him to accurately measure the growth of oat seedlings in consistent lighting and temperatures without introducing geotropic curvature.

Although several senior researchers resigned in protest, over the course of eight years Koningsberger cultivated a sense of solidarity in the station, which employed 32 staff at the peak of the sugar boom.

[5] Writing in Plant and Soil, M. H. van Raalte described the sugar cane industry under Koningsberger as "an example of scientifically guided agriculture in the tropics.

[7] He attributed these discrepancies to the continuity of life processes, which affect the results of physiological endeavours, whereas chemistry research was done in more constant settings.

[3] On 25 November 1940, shortly following the expulsion of Jewish academics in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Koningsberger spoke out, delivering a speech that began "My conscience compels me to commemorate here, with deep sorrow and disappointment, the dismissal from their office of a number of Dutch colleagues, solely on grounds of their origin or religion.

"[a][10] According to the historian Henk van Rinsum, Koningsberger was the first to publicly oppose the expulsion; a similar speech was delivered by Rudolph Cleveringa the following day.

[11] Koningsberger was dispatched to the Indies in 1946 to survey the situation of sugar cultivation in the colony, which had proclaimed its independence the previous year following the withdrawal of the Empire of Japan.

Two years after this three-month survey, he returned to the archipelago to work on restoring the ravaged sugar industry;[9] the experimentation station, for instance, had few remaining workers and little material.