Kuno von Westarp

Kuno von Westarp
Kuno von Westarp
	Westarp in 1924
Chairman of the ; German National People's Party
	In office; 24 March 1926 – 20 October 1928
Preceded by	Johann Friedrich Winckler
Succeeded by	Alfred Hugenberg
Member of the Reichstag
	In office; 24 June 1920 – 4 June 1932
Constituency	Potsdam II
Personal details
Born	12 August 1864; Ludom, Province of Posen; Kingdom of Prussia
Died	30 July 1945 (aged 80); Berlin, Germany
Political party	BDL (1890s); DkP (1900s–1918); DNVP (1918–1930); KVP (1930–1933);
Occupation	Jurist

Count Kuno Friedrich Viktor von Westarp (12 August 1864 – 30 July 1945) was a conservative politician in Germany.

Life and career

Westarp was born in

Leipzig, and Berlin, passed the Staatsexamen in 1886 and did his military service in Breslau and Potsdam, where he was elevated to a reserve officer of the 1st Foot Guard

regiment.

In 1887 he began his career in civil service at the administrative district (Landkreis) office in Freienwalde, Brandenburg whose head was Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the later Chancellor of Germany. After his second Staatsexamen in 1891 Westarp continued his career as an assessor in Gostyn and Bomst in Posen, and in Stettin. He joined the service of the Prussian State Ministry in 1902 and became Chief of Police in the Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf suburbs of Berlin, before in 1908 he was appointed a senior judge at the Prussian administrative court.

Westarp had joined the

submarine warfare and rejected the reform of the Prussian three-class franchise

initiated by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg.

After the

German Revolution of 1918–19, Westarp became one of the founding members of the German National People's Party (DNVP). From 1919 he worked as an editor of the conservative Kreuzzeitung newspaper whose shareholder he became in 1925. While his career in civil service ended with his retirement in 1920, he was again elected into the Reichstag parliament of the Weimar Republic. Initially an exponent of the far-right, anti-democratic forces within his party, he was involved in the preparations of the failed Kapp Putsch

, however, he adopted more centrist positions in the mid-1920s, rising to become head of the DNVP parliamentary group and party chairman in 1926.

In 1925 the DNVP had temporarily abandoned its anti-republican attitude by joining the German cabinet in a liberal-conservative

1929 referendum, he finally left the DNVP in 1930. In the same year he and Gottfried Treviranus were among the founders of the moderate Conservative People's Party

(KVP), with which he sat in the Reichstag until 1932.

Westarp did not stand for another seat in the

Machtergreifung he retired into private life. Suspected by the Nazi authorities to be involved in the 20 July plot, preliminary investigations against him furnished no proof. At the end of World War II, he was temporarily arrested by Soviet occupation

forces in Berlin but soon released and died shortly afterwards.

Literature

Graf von Westarp, Kuno; Mayer, Karl J.; Weber, Reinhold (2001). Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen, Friedrich (ed.). Konservative Politik im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik. Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien (in German). Vol. 10. Düsseldorf: Droste.
ISBN 3-7700-5239-0
.

External links

Newspaper clippings about Kuno von Westarp in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Authority control databases
International	FAST ISNI VIAF
National	France BnF data Germany Israel United States Netherlands
People	Deutsche Biographie
Other	IdRef