 Gertrud Goldschmidt, called "Gego", was born on August 1, 1912 in Hamburg, Germany into a Jewish family.She was the sixth of seven children of Eduard Martin Goldschmidt and Elizabeth Hanne Adeline Dehn.Although she was the niece of the medieval art historian Adolf Goldschmidt, who taught at the University of Berlin, she decided to attend the Technische Hochschule of Stuttgart in 1932, where she was taught by popular masonry artist Paul Bonatz.