Kuno von Westarp

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 Ludom (present-day Ludomy, Poland) in the Prussian Province of Posen, the son of a senior forestry official. He attended the Gymnasium secondary school in Potsdam and studied jurisprudence at the universities of Tübingen, Breslau, 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 German Agrarian League in the 1890s, his political advancement began in 1908 as a member of the German Reichstag parliament as a member of the German Conservative Party, from 1913 to 1918 as head of the parliamentary group. During World War I, he agitated against the 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution, advocated the use of unrestricted submarine warfare and rejected the reform of the Prussian three-class franchise initiated by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg.