Kurt Weiler was born August 16, 1921, in Lehrte, as the son of a merchant. He went to school for eleven years before he attended an apprenticeship as a merchant in Hannover. On November 10, 1938, one day after the "Night of Broken Glass" of anti-Jewish pogroms, Weiler and his father were arrested in Lehrte. Like every male Jew in Lehrte, he was brought to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Due to his age, Kurt Weiler was released and escaped in a children's transport to England in 1939. There, he attended classes in painting and graphic art at Oxford’s City School of Arts and Crafts until he was termed an enemy foreigner and became a detainee at the beginning of World War II.

After his release from war captivity, Weiler started to become interested in film and came in contact with leftist circles. Animation filmmaker Peter Sachs employed him as an assistant editor and director and also allowed him to work as an animator for animated commercials. In Sachs's film production company Larkins & Co., Weiler learned the trade of animation filmmaking. When Larkins & Co. was liquidated in 1950, Weiler relocated to the German Democratic Republic. After a short employment at DEFA, he left again and became the head of the puppet theatre in Berlin-Weißensee. There, he also finished his first animation film with puppets, "Oskar Kulicke und der Pazifist", that dealt with the topic of Germany’s rearmament.

Weiler then returned to DEFA and directed several animation films, including "Die gestohlene Nase" (1955), "Die Geschichte von den fünf Brüdern" (1957), or "Käptn Spatz" (1957). His only, 26-minute long, live-action feature film "Der verlorene Ball" (1959) tells the story of a ball that becomes alive and gets all the children excited. However, this film was banned from screening in the GDR. Weiler also finished the classic animation film "Die Geschichte vom tapferen Schneiderlein" during the 1960s, as well as several popular scientific documentary films.

From the mid-1970s on, Weiler started to produce animation parts for live-action feature films, for instance, for "Konzert für Bratpfanne und Orchester" (1975). From 1977 to 1989, he was a leading employee at DEFA-Studio für Trickfilme. Furthermore, he taught the history and aesthetics of animation films at Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf in Potsdam-Babelsberg from 1987 to 1998.

Kurt Weiler died August 2, 2016 in Kleinmachnow near Potsdam, age 94.