Deutscher was born in Berlin, Germany in 1936. His family fled the Nazis in 1939, shortly before World War II, and settled down (first illegally) in Paris, France. In July 1942, he was arrested with his mother at the " Vel d'Hiv" roundup (la rafle du vélodrome d'hiver). Still, luckily because his father was a French prisoner of war, he escaped the fate of most of the other detainees who were sent to their deaths mainly to Auschwitz. After the war, Deutscher completed his Baccalaureat at Lycée Henri IV in 1953. In 1956, he passed the entrance exam and was accepted into the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris, from which he graduated in 1959 with a Diplome d'ingenieur Civil des Mines, specializing in metallurgy. After three years of military service, he joined the research group of Nobel Laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes at the university of Paris-Sud (Orsay). The group was later known as the "Orsay group on superconductivity". It was nicknamed by de Gennes as the four "Musketeers" including Deutscher, E. Guyon, J.P. Burger, and A. Martiner.