Between the wars he served on the General Staff of the Reichswehr and the infantry and cavalry and by the outbreak of World War II he had reached the rank of Oberst in the Wehrmacht and was appointed chief of the organizations section of the Oberkommando des Heeres as senior officer to Claus von Stauffenberg.

He was badly injured and hospitalised in 1944 by the 20 July plot bomb planted by von Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia.

He entered the conference room with von Stauffenberg and when a point was raised that von Stauffenberg might have been expected to answer, Buhle was perplexed that he was no longer present and looked for him in the corridor.

Buhle recovered from his injuries and in the last days of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler appointed him chief of armaments for the army.

After the war, he was a POW at Camp Ritchie in Maryland and was involved with the Hill Project, an effort to use German POWs to translate texts to better understand military efforts of the Nazi regime following the end of the war.