 Bergmann was born in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany on February 12, 1886.After he received his Ph.D, in 1911, he became the assistant to Hermann Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin, where he stayed until Fischer's suicide in 1919.Bergmann was the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research in Dresden, which was created in 1921 and upon which the Max-Planck-Institute was based.