Joseph Bueys was born in northwest Germany, in a small town called Krefeld. He was born to a middle-class devoted Catholic couple, Joseph Jakob Bueys and Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann. However, the family soon moved to Kleve, an industrial town. When he was twelve, Bueys remembers, the Nazi Party called a book burning (1933) and he retrieved Systema Naturae by Carolus Linnaeus from the fire. Yet, in a contrary decision to the previous one, Bueys was convinced to join the Hitler Youth. His passions were identified as drawing, music, history, mythology, and social and natural sciences; he pursued a short career in medicine. This came to a quick end though, when in 1941 he became a part of the Luftwaffe
