Background
Kuno von Westarp was bom in Ludom, Posen, on August 12, 1864, the son of a head forester.
Kuno von Westarp was bom in Ludom, Posen, on August 12, 1864, the son of a head forester.
After studying law, Westarp joined the Prussian civil service, becoming district magistrate in Bomst, Posen, in 1893 and seven years later in Randow, near Stettin.
From 1903 until 1908 he served as police director and finally as president of police in Berlin-Schoneberg; from 1908 until 1920 he sat as justice of the Supreme Court in Berlin. Westarp joined the Reichstag in 1908, and four years later was appointed head of the Conservative party's parliamentary caucus. In fact, since the party's leader, Ernst von Heydebrand und der Lasa, the “uncrowned king of Prussia," concentrated his efforts on defending the three-class franchise in Prussia, Westarp effectively became the leading Conservative spokesman on the national level. An uncompromising Conservative, Westarp was sharp and cutting in his speeches, hard and cold towards any and all critics of Prussia.
At the outset of the Great War Westarp demanded sweeping German annexations as well as indemnities. With regard to Belgium, he sought "occupation of the whole country and complete economic domination"; the Longwy-Briey coal fields were to become German, and a large colonial empire in Central Africa was to be carved out of French, Belgian, and Portuguese holdings there. "Free access to the sea" would be accorded the German navy. And as the agrarian party, the Conservatives demanded immense territorial gains in Poland, the Baltic states, and Russia. Westarp never wavered in his radical annexationist stance. In 1916 he rejected President Woodrow Wilson's peace initiative as "intolerable" to Germany; in August 1917, he refused to define his position on Belgium, thereby undermining Pope Benedict XV's peace proposals; in 1918 Westarp denounced the peace accords of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest as being too moderate. By the end of September 1918, the Conservative leader still demanded German annexation of Belgium and large indemnities as prerequisites for a general peace.
At home Westarp aimed his sights on Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. When, in September 1916, the chancellor hinted at postwar domestic reforms, Westarp vehemently denounced any tinkering with the Bismarckian constitutional system; he viewed the three-class suffrage as "an internal affair of Prussia." In July 1917, he conspired with General Erich Ludendorff, Colonel Max Bauer, and other parliamentary leaders to topple Bethmann Hollweg, whom he considered "utterly unfit for the chancellorship." Westarp that same month denounced the Reichstag's peace resolution: "We would rather win ourselves to death than to succumb cowardly." And when Foreign Secretary Richard von Kiihlmann on June 24, 1918, informed Parliament that military victory was no longer attainable,
Westarp promptly apprised army leaders of this revelation and then delivered a blistering attack on the foreign secretary, whom he accused of defeatism. Kiihlmann was forced to resign, and Westarp enjoyed his last political triumph in imperial Germany.
Kuno von Westarp, like many right-wing politicians, submerged in November 1918, only to reap¬pear two years later as one of the leaders of the German National People's party, whose parliamentary caucus he led from 1920 until 1925. Although Westarp in 1926 was elected head of the party, he fre¬quently clashed with Alfred Hugenberg, who demanded unbending opposition to all Weimar governments, and four years later quit the party. With Gottfried Treviranus, Westarp in 1930 founded the Conservative People's party, which he represented in the Reichstag for the next two years. A diehard monarchist and Prussian, Westarp played no major role in German politics after 1933; in June 1945, the Russians arrested him, but he died shortly thereafter, on July 30, 1945, in Berlin.