Heinrich Wohlwill, grandson of Immanuel Wohlwill, well-known Jewish Enlightenment philosopher and head of the Jacobsen School in Seesen, was born in 1874. He graduated from the Wilhelm Gymnasium in Hamburg and then studied chemistry in Heidelberg, Munich and Berlin. In 1898 he received his doctorate at the newly founded Institute for Physical Chemistry Institut für Physikalische Chemie in Göttingen. After university, he started working at Norddeutsche Affinerie as a chemist and was elected to succeed his father as technical director on its executive board in 1913.

The family lived for many years in the Hagedornstraße and in 1929 moved into a newly built semi-detached house at Hindenburgstraße 111 in Hamburg-Alsterdorf. Wohlwill is mentioned as a member of the Chamber of Commerce in 1925, and again in 1933 and 1934. He joined the Patriotic Society Patriotische Gesellschaft in 1929. Heinrich Wohlwill had played an important economic role; in 1903 he had invented a process with the help of which copper could be recovered. This patent was an important basis for the growth of Norddeutsche Affinerie before the Second World War.