text: He was the son of the pediatrician Adalbert Czerny, his mother was the daughter of a large landowner in Upper Silesia. He attended high school in Strasbourg and later achieved the rank of lieutenant in the Guards Infantry.
  His left elbow was shot through in 1916 during World War I. From 1918 he studied at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg and then at the University of Berlin. In 1923 he received his doctorate in Berlin with a dissertation in infrared physics entitled Über eine neue Form der Rubensschen Reststrahlmethode (On a new form of Rubens' residual beam method), which he began under Heinrich Rubens and which was supervised by Gerhard Hettner after his death.