The son of a chemicals industrialist, Bergius, who was born in Goldschmieden, Poland, gained his doctorate at Leipzig (1907) and worked with Hermann Nernst at Berlin and Fritz Haber at Karlsruhe, where he became interested in high-pressure chemical reactions. He was a professor at the Technical University at Hannover (1909–14) and then worked for the Goldschmidt Organization until 1945.

He is noted for his development of the Bergius process – a method of treating coal or heavy oil with hydrogen in the presence of catalysts, so as to produce lower-molecular-weight hydrocarbons. The process was important as a German source of gasoline in World War II. After the war Bergius lived in Austria and Spain before settling in Argentina as a technical adviser to the government, working on the production of sugar, alcohol, and cattle feed from wood. He shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with Carl Bosch in 1931.