Wilhelm Ludwig was born as the son of Wolfgang Ludwig (1855-1919) and Josepha Katharina Taumer (1855-1919).
During the Second World War in 1942, he was in the Luftwaffe, but was retracted a little later to the Reich Office for Weatherproof offsets and in 1943 to the Agricultural Meteorological Research Centre in Giessen, where he worked until the war ended.